
ri;isf; "Rv 2?;o 



Book_lZ_ 



Ci)P)aUGHT DEPOSm 



of 

jftank M» (Buneaulus 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1922, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY/^^O 



^ 



By 

Frank W. Gunsaulus, D.D. 



Prayers of Frank W, Gunsaulus 

i2mo. cloth JS5I.25 

The Higher Ministries of Recent 
English Poetry 

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Paths to the City of God 

and other Sermons 

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m 23 1922 

©CI,A677001 



To the memory of my Father 
FRANK WAKELT GUNSAULUS 

who^ a year ago this Easter-timey entered 
completely into the Life Eternal which 
he ilhtmined for his fellow-men durhtg 
all the years of his ministry, 

^^And this is life eternal, that they 
might know thee^ the only true God and 
Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent^ 



Preface 

THESE prayers uttered in Central Church, 
Chicago, between the years 1913-1918, 
are gathered together in the knowledge that 
having been helpful to those who for many 
years heard Dr. Gunsaulus on Sunday morn- 
ings, they will be even more precious now that 
his voice among us is stilled. They were taken 
verbatim, during the service, interwoven as 
they were with the hymns, anthems and sermon 
into what he always strove to make, a unified 
thought running throughout the order of serv- 
ice. He preached through his choir almost as 
much as through the spoken word, and in the 
case of the prayers used in the service it has 
been thought well to mention the line referred 
to of the hymn, song or anthem which preceded 
his prayer which so often was a continuance 
and completing of the thought expressed in the 
music. The titles and composers of the music 
are listed, in the order of their quotation, on a 
page at the end of this volume. 

The prayers are grouped under four head- 

S 



6 PREFACE 



ings: those offered at the opening of Service, 
those used during the Service, prayers in War- 
time, and prayers for Special Occasions, such as 
New Year, Easter and Christmas. This was 
done with the thought that they might be more 
easily referred to by those who would be com- 
forted, strengthened, and inspired by them. 

Helen C. Gunsaulus. 
Chicago^ March //, 1922. 



Contents 

Prayers Used at the Opening of Service 7 

Prayers Used During Service . . 49 

Prayers in Time of War . . .85 

Prayers Offered on Special Occasions . 119 

List of Musical Selections Referred to 

IN Prayers . . . . .159 



A MORNING PRAYER 

GUARD me for yet another day, 
For life is new with morning's ray ; 
And foes are strange, untrod the way : 
Guard me through this an unknown day. 

Gird me for yet another day, 
Though guarded I must fight and pray; 
Teach me to draw my sword or stay : 
O gird, while guarding me to-day. 

Guide me for yet another day : 
Guarded and girded, yet I stray. 
Find paths for me and I obey : 
Guard, gird and guide me, one more day. 

Guard, gird and guide me every day. 
So when all things of time decay. 
In morn of heaven by grace, I may 
Enter thy perfectness of day. 



PRAYERS USED AT THE OPEN 
ING OF SERVICE 



ALMIGHTY Father of us all, we 
thank Thee for these associations and 
rejoicings and psalms of praise, and for 
this place of prayer. We rejoice that we are 
all understood here by One whose eye never 
faileth, whose pity is everlasting, and whose 
sympathy is as large as all the universe domi- 
nated by the throne of our great Father, our 
God. 

We are here this morning with so many 
needs, such intricate ways, such complex and 
serious problems that only the divine hand 
may touch our wound in safety; only the di- 
vine kindness that moves amidst many sick- 
nesses with stillness; only a love that remem- 
bers our griefs and would not make them more 
agonizing ; only the power to redeem that may 
save the lowliest; — only this we ask for, the 
presence of Thyself, O God, in Christ Jesus, 
our Lord. Amen. 

OUR Father God, to whom we come as 
children this morning, unable to tell the 
story of our wants, our woes, our joys 
and satisfactions, our deepest happiness, our 
largest dreams, interpret Thou our hearts. We 
are. Heavenly Father, like an old page upon 

II 



12 PRAYERS USED 

which there was once written a story in one 
language and upon which there was written 
more lately another language, and we find 
these languages confounding and strange one 
to another. We read out of the past now and 
then and then we come a little nearer and read 
out of our experiences that lap over into the 
present. Lord, Thou canst read every lan- 
guage of every heart. We cannot interpret 
one another. We bewilder and mislead one 
another. Even love does not completely tell 
the story of any life to any other life. O, but 
Thou knowest and Thou lovest and at the very 
beginning of this worship, at this hour, we 
bring Thee strangely written manuscripts of 
life and time ; we bring Thee hearts that do not 
know one another perfectly, knowing that 
Thou wilt tell us all things that we are to 
know, in the Name and by the power of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OUR Father and our God, we are here 
from near and far. We have brought 
with us varied experiences through the 
Providence which has followed us through all 
the years. At length we are gathered together 
for the first time and for the last time. We 
are not ships that are passing in the night 
merely, hailing each other at passing, we are 
Thy children, members of the family of God; 



F^ 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 13 

we are at home with one another; we have 
sweet words we may say to one another by 
which we know we are of the household. 
There are blessed promises that belong to us 
all, that bind us together. 

O Lord, Thy Spirit, the Spirit of Unity and 
of Truth and of Hospitality, the Spirit that 
shall make every one of us feel that we are 
come home in faith and love and joy, through 
Christ, and in His dear Name, — let this Spirit 
come to us all, through our Elder Brother — 
Christ Jesus. Amen. 



OLORD, our God, we are ever with Thee, 
and in Thine own purpose we have al- 
ways been. We come out of the Eternity with 
Thee, for Thou hast had us in mind evermore. 
We thank Thee that Thou dost command com- 
munion with Thine own children and that we 
are lifted into fellowship with Almighty God. 
We stop this morning to think about our fel- 
lowship. It is so great ; it has such majesty of 
command upon us that we would pray for help 
while we think of it. To be in communion 
with the Author of our being ; to touch the next 
task with an alliance with God; to know that 
whatever we do we cannot be away from Him. 
O, solemnize our trivial lives; make sacred, 
we pray Thee, the passing moments. Fill our 
souls with the sense of nobility of our lives in 



14 PRAYERS USED 

Thee. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father, we rejoice in our 
childhood unto Thee, greater than all 
facts, mightier than all other impulses, sweeter 
than all other recollections is this : we belong to 
Thee. Much we have lost in life, much we 
have gained, but from the beginning and on 
and forever on, we are and shall be Thy chil- 
dren. Some of us have wandered, some of us 
have blundered — Yea, all of us have made mis- 
takes and sinned. Thou art our Father yet; 
Thou art our God yet, Thou art greater than 
evil, greater than sin. So we come to Thee. 
Receive us, we pray Thee, in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR eternal Father, who dost never for- 
get us, who, though we are living in 
time, dost remind us of the eternity from which 
we come and into which we shall go, — give 
our minds, we beseech Thee, this morning to 
that same recollection of whence we came or 
some anticipation of whither we shall go, so 
that our spirits shall be exalted above earth, 
and yet that we may be faithful to the things 
of earth and time and make this morning a 
morning in which we shall realize our sonship 
and daughterhood unto Thee, our Father. We 
pray this for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 15 

OTHOU great Silence and Speech, Thou 
who art from everlasting to everlasting, 
Thou whose glory it is to conceal a thing that 
Thou mayest reveal — we come to Thee with 
our noisy lives, our perplexing cares, our petty 
irritations, our weaknesses, our sins. We have 
very little to give to Thee save these, perhaps 
a good purpose, a right intention, a struggle. 
Thou canst take it all and make out of it in- 
finitely, and Thou art present here to help us. 
May every one of us be praying for this help, 
and we ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD God, we never stray from Thy 
presence except in our own thoughts, by 
our own action, into strange ways of our own 
invention and pride and thoughtlessness. 
When we are not with Thee, oftentimes. Thou 
art with us. Thou followest us: Thou dost 
stand round about us ; Thou dost beset us be- 
fore and behind, because Thou dost love us. 
When here in this presence we recognize the 
fact that we are together looking heavenward ; 
how surely we find that we have forgotten 
Thee, and Thou hast not forgotten us. O, 
Thou unforgetting love, lead us this morning, 
nourish us this morning, bring us back home 
this morning. May this morning be like an 
everlasting morning that shall come, the dawn 
of light for joy and singing. We ask in the 



16 PRAYERS USED 

Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OGOD, forever and ever our Lord, be the 
Lord of our thoughts and feelings and 
hopes, our joys, this morning, and our griefs 
always. Very many of us have come together 
here, O God, with nothing sufficiently inter- 
esting to hold us in times of sorrow and dis- 
appointment, in the storm. Wilt Thou inter- 
est us this morning in Thyself! Deliver us 
from ourselves by taking us into Thyself. We 
bring to Thee such a variety of experience of 
the human thought that the endeavoring to 
circumscribe it staggers and hesitates and fails. 
Thou shalt not fail with us. Thou shalt take 
us all in. Thou wait take all of us; every side 
of us. We can leave it all to Thee Give 
us this hour of peace and strength and progress, 
through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



ALMIGHTY Father and Friend, we are 
here in Thy presence no more than we 
were in Thy presence a moment since, and yet 
in a sense, O God, because we are all Thy chil- 
dren and confess to one another our affection 
and our hope, we are in Thy presence as those 
that have come home to hear the voice of the 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 17 

Father again and to confess our wanderings 
and receive Thy blessings. We are always in 
Thy presence, but especially, O Lord, we are 
here this morning to open our hearts for Thy 
blessing — so many of us so differing in need, at 
the one hearthstone of blessing. Father, bless 
Thy children through Thine own elder Son, 
our elder Brother, the Child of Thine own love, 
who has not gone wrong as we have gone 
wrong. Bless, we beseech Thee, through Jesus 
Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



ALMIGHTY God, who art our Father, in 
whose Name we have the expectation of 
grace because Thou hast said '' For my Name's 
sake will I do this, will I redeem thee, will I 
comfort thee, will I save thee," hear us, we 
beseech Thee, as we come into Thy presence 
and not relying upon our own character but 
relying upon the character of our God, we try 
to find again the foundations of the real and 
true character and seeking these and finding 
them by Thy grace, in Jesus Christ, we try to 
rebuild with Thy help, in spite of all our mis- 
calculations and above all, all our sins. O 
Lord, help us, help us at this time as we try in 
the midst of the wreckage to build something 
worthy of Thy goodness and worthy of our 
hope. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



18 PRAYERS USEH 

ALMIGHTY Father and Friend, com- 
mand a blessing upon us, we beseech 
Thee this morning, and let Thy blessing be 
Thine own presence, for without Thee we may- 
do nothing. We are here this morning because 
life is so important and heavy as a burden, and 
bright as a possibility glowing before us with 
its opportunities, then a tangled pathway, then 
a stream beset with rocks. Just because life 
is all these things and more than these things, 
we need our Father's hand and our Father's 
blessing and our Father's good leadership and 
guidance. We have come here, O Lord, to 
honor; w^e have come here with self-respect, 
with joy in our hearts; Thou wilt not disap- 
point us. Lead us, we beseech Thee, for 
Christ's dear sake. Amen. 

OLORD God, the Father of our spirits, 
judge of all the earth, our eternal hope 
and reward, we are here this morning with a 
multitude of necessities that cry out beyond 
our prayerful words. We cannot give them 
the language of our hearts; these necessities 
are too deep, too strong. We bring them to 
Thee, and ask Thee, thou listening God, to 
hear where we cannot speak and to translate 
out of our lives the deep, strong yearnings that 
lie beneath all our failures, — the aspirations 
that climb up on the trellis of our faith toward 
the Son of Righteousness. We ask for this 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 19 

hour of worship, aspiration, teaching, instruc- 
tion in righteousness, according to Thy Holy 
Spirit. This we ask in the Name and for the 
sake of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OUR Father God, because we are Thy chil- 
dren, we are here, homeward bound, 
looking homeward because the feeling has been 
stirred within us in this first moment of wor- 
ship that we belong to Thee and that Thou 
dost belong to us. We shall always be aweary 
and alien until we are in Thine own heart of 
hearts, reconciled by the love Thou hast given 
to the world in our Elder Brother. Father, we 
thank Thee for this hour. Let us open all the 
doors of gratitude that the good angels of Thy 
mercy and guidance may come in. We will 
give Thee all the glory of this blessing through 
endless ages as we respond in our prayer unto 
Thee. Amen. 

OLORD God, our Eternal Friend, how 
stable and supreme is the thought that 
wherever, however we may have wandered, the 
Rock of Ages stands amid all the flood of 
things, bathed in the sunshine of love, cleft 
for each of us, a harbor and a haven. And we 
are here this morning, O God, not to tell Thee 
in words, but to pray just now together that 
every heart may be open, that the Divine Love 



20 PRAYERS USED 

may find each one's message to Thee. Per- 
haps we may not have prayed hi any way save 
with the unconscious desire for a long time. 
Teach us, Master, how to pray. We know 
how to work; we know how to achieve; we 
know how to fail; we know how to succeed; 
we know many things that we may do and 
that we are doing — but every one of them is 
being done so poorly because we do not know 
how to pray. If we have forgotten the old 
prayers, teach us again to say them from our 
hearts and out of our experience of sorrow 
and sin and pain and woe. But hast Thou no 
new prayers for us from this new day when 
the Autumn ripeness comes upon the grape, 
when yonder in the orchard Nature Itself finds 
the prayers of the Springtime in all the beauty 
of this September day? Dear God, teach us 
how to pray in the name of the Master, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU that art of eternity, we whose 
concerns of time are often so heavy and 
yet so dear that we may not bear them, we 
come to Thee and rejoice that the shoulders 
of the Almighty are under all our cares and 
tasks and problems which we call our burdens, 
and that these burdens are so transferred into 
treasures that they come back to us in imagi- 
nation and hope of the Christian life as the 
blessings of the Almighty whose Name is Love. 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 21 

We give Thee glory, we give Thee thanksgiv- 
ing, we give Thee praise. We bring to Thee 
this morning, each one of us, out of the Gar- 
den of Life, some special blossom of our grati- 
tude, and we ask this morning, O Lord, that 
Thou shouldst water the Garden of the Lord 
and fill all the s{)aces with the sunshine of Thy 
peace and graciousness so that we may be 
eternally grateful unto Thee for all that has 
been and all that is and all that shall be, in 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

OUR Heavenly Father, how precious is the 
place of prayer. How delightful these 
associations that seem to be of earth but are of 
heaven. Though our citizenship is in heaven, 
we are living in the atmosphere of the eternal 
and the infinite. We come again this morning 
and strike our hands gladly in this friendship, 
but we know that the unseen and everlasting 
Companion is at our side, and we realize the 
presence of the Holy Spirit. We thank Thee, 
we adore Thee, we pray Thee for Thy bless- 
ing this morning in a special manner upon 
every one of us and all that we represent, in 
the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, our Father and Friend, 
we are here again and some of us for the 
first time and we are here because Thou art 



22 PRAYERS USED 

our Father. We draw aside from all Thou 
hast said to us in nature, from what Thou hast 
spoken to us in all the music in the fields and 
flowers and streams, to come into personal re- 
lationship with Thee. We are like children 
who wish more than Thy grace : we wish Thy- 
self. We are like ones in a household where 
we would have the hand and the smile and the 
forgiveness, more than anything Thou canst 
give us. Give us these things to-day. We 
ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Heavenly Father, why should we lift 
our praise unto Thee this morning when 
we cannot add a single ray of glory to the 
throne nor pour into the great chord of the 
universe any joy? We ask ourselves this ques- 
tion as we come into the very presence of the 
Omnipotence and Omniscience ruling the uni- 
verse. Then there steals over us the sweet and 
encouraging thought that Thou desirest com- 
munion. Thou hast come all the way to us, 
through our Lord, Thou hast come, by way of 
the Holy Spirit, Thou hast come, so many, 
many times Thou hast come to us in familiar 
ways ; by providences Thou hast come ; through 
sorrows and joys Thou hast come. Thou art 
so rich and yet Thou wouldst have Thy chil- 
dren around Thy throne in communion, as a 
Father would have his children. We thank 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 20 

Thee for the fellowship of this service. May 
it be ours through all our lifetime. We ask 
through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OLORD, we take into our prayer this 
morning all conditions, all achievements, 
all frustrations of hope, all blighted buds that 
shall never fully bloom, all the grief and all the 
tears, that we may take into the little cup which 
we offer to Thee; and we recognize that on 
the outside there are millions untouched by our 
comprehension. Thou knowest all; Thou 
knowest everybody's need. We commend unto 
Thee the child Humanity, the blundering, 
faithless, mistaken, rising, hoping, believing 
child Humanity — in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



COME, Holy Spirit, come and indite our 
petitions with love and faith and hope. 
May we know that Some One else is helping 
us to pray, for we know so little. Our horizons 
are small and fade in the mist. Let this hour 
be an hour of prayer. All the way through 
this service may we be looking unto Thee, O 
God, and wilt Thou teach us how to pray. We 
ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



24< PRAYERS USED 

WE do praise Thee, Thou Almighty Love. 
We cannot compass Thee this morning 
with the lines of light that fall upon us from 
Thy throne. We cannot even tell Thy Name 
to our hearts. We have called Thee Wisdom, 
we have called Thee Love, we have called 
Thee Truth ; every age and every people have 
brought a name for Thee, but O, Thou Secret 
of our Being, Thou that art nearer to us than 
breathing, Thou that art indeed our All and 
in all, we bring Thee experiences of these days 
of separation and of this morning of reunion 
to Thee. We cast them all before Thy throne. 
We do praise Thee. Every blessing has come 
from Thee. Nothing but good in all the path- 
wavs shall come. And we offer to Thee now 
and here ourselves. Thine own, for all the des- 
tinies of the future, in Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD God, who art the portion of 
our inheritance, who art our Best, our 
Truest, our Holiest in our life and in our vi- 
sion, we thank Thee that we are permitted to 
come into the presence of Thy majesty and 
lo ! as we come and as we try mentally to bring 
ourselves up to the occasion, to measure and 
to count, we find that Thy glories are all gath- 
ered into one: Love, Love everywhere. Love 
always. Love that was and Love that is and 
Love that is to be — God over all, blessed, for- 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 25 

ever. Accept, we pray Thee, this morning, the 
acclaim of grateful hearts, accept also the 
weariness, accept the bewilderedness, the igno- 
rance and the mistakes — all we bring to Thee, 
for no one else in the universe will accept many 
of these things. Our friends will not accept 
them; our enemies refuse. Thou wilt accept 
them all. O great Artist, Thou wilt take the 
hardest stone and make the most beautiful 
thing out of it, because of its strength in Jesus 
Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



OGOD, our God, God of all our life and 
of all our hope, our first thought this 
morning is praise, and out of our praise there 
comes our prayer, haltingly enough, but sin- 
cerely, the prayer for light, the prayer for all 
the warmth that comes with the light. We 
thank Thee, O God, for the Light that is the 
light of men, for Him around whom we come, 
all our differences, with all our varied experi- 
ences united in one thing: that we do love 
Him and only Him — even Christ. O Lord, 
Thou knowest altogether what we would tell 
Thee if we could, and because Thou knowest 
and art all sympathetic and all powerful, we 
give this service into Thine own hands with 
our lives, our hearts, our hopes, in the Name 
of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



26 PRAYERS USED 

OLORD, we bring to Thee this many- 
sided and perplexing occasion, where so 
many lives are gathered, where the streams of 
life flow forward, and we pray this morning 
that this audience may be lifted by the Divine 
Spirit upon such a mount of privilege that we 
may see the fair fields below and know that 
the harvest time has its appeal to our heart, so 
that we may sow the seed as in the springtime. 
We shall prepare the ground. So may we en- 
ter Thy spirit by the preparation of the soil 
of our hearts. May the seed be sown in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ 
Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, we are in Thine own 
hands wherever we are, but especially do 
we feel the tender pressure of goodness as we 
come together to worship Thee, to see one an- 
other in the light of the great redemption. 
We thank Thee for the meanings of this hour, 
for the revelations of this moment as they 
come and go. We are more to one another 
because we are so much to Thee and Thou art 
so much to us. Seal these blessed friendships, 
unite our hearts in one constant theme and 
anthem of praise and prayer. May this morn- 
ing be a morning indeed that shall invite into 
itself all the joys and hopes of Thy kingdom. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 27 

OLORD we thank Thee that this dear 
church, like a mother, has coming unto 
her the children of want and despair and sin, 
the aching and weary ones, the perplexed and 
misguided ones, and for them we lift up the 
voice of prayer this morning. We pray Thee 
to rescue and help, we beseech Thee to save and 
to heal ; above all, we pray Thee to forgive sins 
and take away by holiness and Thy love every 
shred of iniquity from us and them, in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OUR Heavenly Father, who art our God 
and our King, what other thought may 
bring us together with unanimity this morning 
save the thought of Thee? 

Across our sorrows and over our joys, in 
the glade, on the upland, on the heights and in 
the depths, there Thou art for all of us and for 
each of us, and whether we look to-day through 
our tears or through our smiles; whether we 
are under the rod, passing through deep afflic- 
tion, or on the lofty places in the joy of Time, 
there Thou art. 

Thou art to lead us through our joy to 
greater joy; through our sorrows to deeper 
consolations. Thou alone must preside over 
us this morning. Bring in every wandering 
thought; tether to Thy throne all of our va- 
grant and errant inspiration. First of all, O 



28 PRAYERS USED 

God, in order that they may be bound to Thy 
throne, tether us to Thy cross, O Christ Jesus ! 
Amen. 



ALMIGHTY God, our Father, who art 
holy, who lookest upon us, we come to 
Thee because Thou art holy and not because 
we are holy, but because we would be holy. 
Pity us, we beseech Thee, with the influence of 
Thy salvation. O God, restore unto us the joy 
of Thine own holiness. We thank Thee that 
there is a place in time called Calvary where 
Thou art holy, where Thou dost not permit 
sin to live and where Thou dost forgive sin- 
ners. Father, we thank Thee that we may 
come to that place as we do now and ask the 
forgiveness of our sins through Jesus Christ, 
our Lord. Amen. 



OLORD, our God, it may be that Thou 
comest and art asking us always out of 
Thy mercy and Thy love to be ready. We 
thank Thee that Thou comest at the close of 
the day of Life, as Thou hast come to us in 
the morning. We thank Thee that Thou com- 
est at all seasons of life, robing Thyself in the 
gold of autumn and in the emerald of spring 
and in the white purity of winter and in all 
the raptures and loveliness of summer-time. 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 29 

May we be ready for Thee — ready for Thee 
not because we are in cringing fear, but be- 
cause we are in hearty love, and we ask this 
in the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



ALMIGHTY Father, we thank Thee 
for the privilege of praise. We thank 
Thee for the religion which has taken unto 
herself the garments of song. We pray Thee 
that our voices may be none the less tuneful be- 
cause of the rich experience that shall be ours 
this morning in hearing the Gospel and from 
hearing on high some accents that may not be 
heard upon the earth, because we aspire, by and 
by, to sing around Thy throne. 

We are here in a world of discords, but we 
desire to dominate them by the concord in 
Christ Jesus, our Lord. We know no other 
way than by coming up here and reading the 
score which Thou hast given us. We pray 
Thee give us far-sightedness and clear-sighted- 
ness, and give our hearts willingness to sing 
in the choir of the great Humanity. May we 
be unselfish, may we give ourselves utterly to 
the Leader of this great song organizing out 
of all the years. 

We ask for the sake of the sweetest and the 
dearest of the leaders of the great Orchestra, 
even our Master, Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
Amen. 



30 PRAYERS USED 

IT is our confession, our Heavenly Father, 
and it is our joy to remember that while 
we are praising Thee here below there is an 
anthem above, and when we think of what is 
above us and those who have been dear to us 
who have passed on, we join with the heavenly 
host and say, '' Praise God from whom all 
blessings flow/* 

How they have been flowing for these many 
years into all our lives ! How many times we 
have mistaken the meaning of these blessings ; 
how often we have not called them blessings at 
all — but " Praise God from whom all blessings 
flow " that the blessings still are flowing; that 
it has made no difference with our Heavenly 
Father's bounty that we have counted it a little 
thing. O, forgive us, gracious God, that we 
have ever underestimated ; that we have missed 
in appreciation the divine Gift. And give us one 
more gift this morning: Thy perpetual bless- 
ings, and especially as we worship here bring 
our lives into the great Repair Shop of Thy 
love as we bring our foolishness and our sin 
and our needs, along with the better things. 

O, give us Thyself, the presence of Thyself, 
and all will be well, in Jesus' Name. Amen. 

OGOD, our hearts continue this " Amen." 
We would be close to Thee. Services 
like these coming into our lives with all their 
consciousness endearing us to these Sabbath 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 31 

mornings and to this place serve to make us 
know how far we are from God. What has 
happened in between God, our Father, and us ? 
We would be close unto Thee. We feel that 
the mistake is very, very tragic, and that it has 
led to disaster from pitfall to pitfall. We have 
not been close unto Thee. 

Bring us back this morning through Him 
who revealeth unto us the heart of God, even 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father, in whose Treas- 
ure House are things new and things 
old, we come to Thee this morning in all the 
poverty of our spirit, needing new valuations 
for life, requiring that Thou shouldst do Thine 
own part with the resources of Eternity as we 
find the problems of time, realizing that Thou 
art omnipotent and omniscient and our loving 
God. And O, with what faith we come! 
Some of us with prayers upon our lips that 
shall not find words even there, but we come 
to Thee who knowest all and we ask that we 
may worship in Thy presence and receive Thy 
blessing this morning in the Name of Jesus, 
and by the faith of Jesus and through our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU Father of us all, who knowest 
us all and altogether, we appeal to Thee 
because Thou dost know us so well, and with 



32 PRAYERS USED 

such divine sympathy and pity and power to 
forgive and help. If we were to come here 
together and look into one another's faces 
alone, and feel nothing and know nothing but 
one another, we should come away dismayed 
and disappointed because we may not help one 
another, we may not save one another. None 
of us may save himself, none of us may save 
another, but Thou, Saviour of mankind. Thou 
upon whom the burden of our salvation hath 
rested from the first. Thou canst and wilt. We 
come this morning to look to Thee, to look 
away from ourselves, and to look away from 
one another, to look to Thee, that when we 
look back to one another we may see ourselves 
with gratitude to Thee. May this be the morn- 
ing's experience to us all. We pray in the 
Name of Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Love, who art our God, 
God of the universe yesterday, to-day, 
and forever, how much we need Thee and how 
Thou dost yearn in Thy love. Bless us, O, 
Everlasting Mercy, be merciful; O, Eternal 
Goodness, lead us by Thy kindness, lead us by 
the still waters and in green pastures ; O, Thou 
mighty and just One, let Thy justice be tem- 
pered with mercy and this morning lead us all 
and every one by the hand — that Hand which 
has guided all the destinies of the universe 
from the beginning, the Hand that was scarred 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE SB 

on Calvary — through our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OUR Father God, we come again and 
again and yet again because our wants 
are so numerous and we may not meet them 
ourselves but especially because Thou art good 
and loving and Thou hast invited us. All the 
earth is an invitation this morning and the 
skies invite us, and the seas far away invite 
us. The universe which Thou hast made is the 
symbol of our want and the divine supply and 
everywhere we feel as our thought comes out 
and ranges about through creation that our 
God is waiting for us, waiting to be gracious. 
May we live in the grace of God this morning. 
For this luminous and happy hour we thank 
Thee. For all Thy blessings we adore Thee, 
but especially for the gift of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, who hast endowed the ministry 
of our Lord, Jesus Christ, with a faith 
that reaches forward through all ages, we be- 
seech Thee to give unto Thy servants that 
guardianship, that guidance, and that girding, 
by which through all the days, they may walk 
in strength and in valor through the Captain 
of our Salvation, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 



34 PRAYERS USED 

OLORD, our God, whose eye seeth every 
precious thing, what is there this morn- 
ing except what Thou seest that in any way 
might justify our coming together, for we are 
all weakness, we are all incompetent to handle 
the affairs of the life we are trying to live 
alone, we are all weary — some of us only a 
little tired and others of us very worn — and 
we are all unable to meet even the exactions 
of our own ideals, still less to come up to the 
commands of an All-holy God. 

But the holiness of our Father is the holi- 
ness of love, and we are not frightened. We 
fear with the fear of love. We fear to dis- 
appoint God's plans ; we fear to break the heart 
that was broken on Calvary once and long ago. 

And now. Lord, let love cast out fear. Let 
us realize this morning that we are in the pres- 
ence of an omnipotent love, and it is not ours 
to ask questions as to how Thou shalt bring 
order out of confusion and light out of dark- 
ness. We put ourselves into the molding 
hands of our Father. We ask this in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU Heavenly Father to whom we 
come at all times with our ignorance and 
our faultiness and our iniquity, have we noth- 
ing to bring Thee this morning but these, the 
tatters of decay, the remnants of failure? 
Yea, Lord God, we have given to Thee our sin- 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 35 

cere praise, our hearty worship, our open 
hearts, our needy lives. Thou wilt not disap- 
point us, and we wait for Thy blessing in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OLORD, our God, who hath made us in 
Thine own image, we thank Thee for the 
privileges which come from our creation after 
Thine own image. We can think because Thou 
hast thought, thou great Thinker of the Uni- 
verse. We find Thy thoughts as children find 
threads, and out of all our ignorance we find 
our way by following with our thoughts Thy 
thoughts. Mighty Gift and Mighty Giver! 

O Lord, we thank Thee that we are made 
for love. Thou art eternal Love. We adore 
Thee that we are made to respond to majestic 
willings, purposes and to intentions that are 
divine. We bring our little wheeled vehicle, 
like a child, along to where one of these great 
purposes moves, and we hitch onto the divine. 
Great Gift and Mighty Giver, help us to love 
and to praise and to follow Thee, through our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we are here to-day strangers to 
one another. Thou knowest us all to- 
gether. We are here with many cares sending 
their rootlets down deep into sorrows and 
pains and betimes finding springs of joys. 



36 PRAYERS USED 

We are here with such a variety of experiences, 
and necessities numerous as they are that we 
make our appeal to the infinite God and pray 
Thee that this may be a place of blessing and 
forgiveness to all who come, and may the grace 
of the Lord go with us wherever we go ; may 
we carry the light of joy of this communion 
and fellowship with us. We ask in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Christ Jesus. Amen. 

OTHOU God of all pardon, of all com- 
fort. Thou w^ho dost repair the waste 
places. Thou who dost come to us as the dew 
in all the tenderness of Thy love when we have 
been wounded by the scythe. Thou who de- 
scendest as rain upon mown grass, Thou who 
speakest in the cloud, in the thunder and light- 
ning, speak to us as Thou wilt, but speak to us, 
dear Lord, this morning in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD, our Father, when we come into 
Thy presence for worship and thought 
and love, we know that we are exposing our- 
selves to the Light and that the judgments 
shall be judgments of light. We know that we 
are exposing ourselves to Love, and there are 
no such judgments as the judgments of love; 
we know we are exposing ourselves to Thy 
pity, to the sympathy of God in heaven. May 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 37 

we this morning be willing thus to open our 
hearts and to be open. 

If there are repulsions in us against the evil 
which may have clung to us as we came here, 
may we rejoice that the antagonism proves 
life; that we are not quite dead. O Lord, our 
God, if there are disturbing ideals that feed 
us with the pain of their progress within us, 
may we know that this is the travail of God in 
our soul. If we feel this morning that we 
never may be happy again and live the old life, 
may we grasp the new life through our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ! Amen. 

WE are gathered here, O God, to worship 
Thee, to talk with Thee, to hear Thy 
voice in the silence, in the reverence, in the 
open-heartedness of our needy lives. " Al- 
mighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all 
desires known, and from whom no secrets are 
hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the 
inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit that we may 
perfectly love Thee and worthily magnify Thy 
holy Name, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
Amen." 

ALMIGHTY God, whose friendship is 
our token of Thine everlasting care, we 
are here this morning not because of any 
worthiness ; we have not come up to the oppor- 
tunities of life in any such victorious way as 



38 PRAYERS USED 

to command a favor of heaven. We are here 
because Thou dost love us ; Thou hast given us 
some symbol of great possibilities in the pa- 
tience and the care with which Thou hast 
guided us, and we are here because Thou hast 
never been away from us. Enfold us, we 
pray Thee, in this precious thought and let our 
service this morning be a service of emancipa- 
tion from tumult. May we find the sweet si- 
lence of the Almighty in our lives and in our 
hearts. This we ask through our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father, Thy children gather 
here thanking Thee for the altars of 
Jehovah. Aforetime we have come and we 
have never been disappointed. Thou comest 
to us with much mercy this morning. Bene- 
dictions are about us. Our pathway is strewn 
with Thy mercies. We are here because of 
Thy love. Thy providences, and a particular 
grace that makes us what we are and where we 
are. Stop with us, gentle, mighty Spirit ; stop 
with us in these moments, and may we find out 
something of the purpose which has brought 
us hither, something of the task we are to carry 
on, something of the sweetness of the flower? 
to which we have been blind, something of the 
loveliness of the m.essage that Thou wouldst 
teach us in our pain, something of the deeper 
joy within our joy. i\Iay we not leave this 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE SQ 

hour without being better prepared for the 
hours that He beyond as we are on our way- 
through the eternal in Thee. We ask in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OLORD, our God, so often has this place 
been to us a mountain peak for com- 
munion, so often from this height here have 
we seen things that have shone in upon our 
poor lives, making them rich and beautiful; 
so often has this place been an altar, or the old 
altar has come back here which we had for- 
gotten ! Here we have met our sacrifices ; here 
we have met the Spirit of the Living God and 
the altar fires have burned to heaven! So 
often has this been a place of mercy that we 
have called it the '' Mercy Seat " ; so often has 
it been a precious place of remembrance for 
us; so often has it been a crossing of the Jor- 
dan; so, also, has it been a place of the Trans- 
figuration of the Lord Jesus; so often has it 
been to us the lonely place of Calvary; so often 
has it been Olivet and we have seen His own 
humanity and ours lifted up into the heavens, 
— that we bring all our needs here this morn- 
mg and know that Thou wilt answer them. 

Take us to these places in the spiritual life: 
some to Calvary, some to Olivet, some to Nebo, 
some to Sinai — all of us by way of the Cross, 
in Christ's Name. Amen. 



40 PRAYERS USED. x, 

m ^^— ^— ^— ^i^— ^ — — — — ^— — ^M^— — ^^ 

■i 

O SPIRIT of the highest, thou Spirit of 
Nature and of history of man in his sick- 
nesses and sorrows and disappointments, of 
man in his hope and his rewards and achieve-* 
ments, thou Spirit of the imiverse enfolding 
all our little life in the large life of Thyself; 
our God, declared and made manifest unto us 
in our Brother, Jesus Christ, we are here be- 
cause Thou hast invited us through our own 
nature. The bell we have heard bringing us 
to worship, Thou Thyself hast sounded in our 
own soul. We are here for blessing. We are 
here that we may go into hands competent to 
touch us. We cannot remake ourselves; we 
cannot do as we would with ourselves. O, Di- 
vine Artist, come! Be with us. Thou canst 
take us. This material with which we have 
failed is Thine, Thine, Thine, now. Thine 
forever ! Amen. 

OLORD, as we are summoned here by 
what is in us of inspiration, of hope, by 
what Thou hast for us upon the table of the 
Lord, we pray Thee that we may be fed, that 
to each one there may come this morning that 
special blessing that shall come in a new in- 
spiration of life, in a new and sweeter relation-^ 
ship to all the children of man, and above all 
through the forgiveness of our sins, so that 
we come into Thy presence on the morrow 
wdth a new and holier motive for life. Even 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 4l 

to-day in the midst of the struggle of mankind 
may we find ourselves standing upon the side 
of sacrifice, ready for all things. In the Name 
of Christ, we ask it. Amen. 



ALMIGHTY Love, Thou art our theme 
to-day, and it shall be our theme for- 
ever, and we rejoice, O Thou God of Love, 
that hast manifested Thyself through Jesus 
Christ, our Lord, whom we love, who hast 
loved us not for our sins but hast loved us 
out of the unfathomable heart of the infinite, 
and who in spite of all our sorrows and pains 
and fallings and failings still doth love us. 
Hear us, we pray Thee as we bring to Thee 
to-day the partial notes of the song we would 
like to sing; hear us as within the circle of the 
great hope that by and by somewhere and 
sometime all shall be perfect and complete, we 
offer Thee now our incompleteness, to the 
hands of the infinite artistry of life our imper- 
fections, to the all-perfect One, in the Name of 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



ALMIGHTY God, our Father, we are 
here this morning through a long series 
of providences making our path for us, and by 
a long series of the operations of Thy grace 
wooing us hither. Other lives are concerned 
in our coming here to-day. Long ages have 



42 PRAYERS USED 

prepared this path of worship and aspiration. 
We are here after many costs of service have 
been paid; we are here in the name of a faith 
which has fought many battles and has many 
battles still to fight, but a faith that is already 
flushed with victory. We bring our lives and 
our fortunes ; we bring all that has come to us 
by inheritance; we bring so little until Thou 
hast touched it: then we know we have brought 
so much as to make us sincere, open-minded", 
and personally true. Touch the hard hearts 
with Thy goodness until we are tender ; open 
our wills to the incoming of the purposes of 
the Divine Will. O Lord, we cannot tell Thee 
all — Thou knowest all — all! Thou hast 
watched us from the beginning. Give us a 
little start this morning, we pray Thee, by Thy 
grace and love! Amen. 

OGOD, our Father, how sweet it is to 
meet together here in Thy Name. Here, 
we are understood; here, our deepest sorrow 
is fathomed; here, our darkest doubt has a 
bottom; here, our greatest joy is taken in with 
the joy of the highest. Whatever we have of 
value is more valuable here when we put it 
into Thine own hand. We bring our lives this 
morning — all our experiences — and hand them 
over to Thee. Lord, help us to hand them 
over in gracious happiness. Let us be glad 
that there is some great, dear hand that can 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 43 

take them. Let us be thankful that Thou art 
patient with us as we try to get loose from 
many of the things we can give to no one else 
but Thee. Even let us, Lord, give Thee be- 
side, our troubles, our sins, our shortcomings, 
and our failures: we can do nothing with them. 
Thou canst pardon all our sins. Help us with 
all our difficulties. We give Thee the glory, 
through Jesus Christ. Amen. 



"T Tl 7HERE two or three are gathered to- 
VV gether in my name, there shall I be 
in the midst of them.'' Dear Lord, these words 
come back to us over many ages, and we know 
that we are here in a building not consecrated 
at first to Thy service, but consecrated by Thy 
presence now and by Thy presence always to 
the worship of Almighty God. Wherever Thy 
children are, there is the temple of the Holy 
Spirit, and we pray Thee this morning that in 
this place we may feel what has come to the 
children of men in the desert, on the moun- 
tainside, along by the flowing stream, in the 
dungeons where St. Peter wrote his epistles 
and along the mighty heights climbed by the 
feet that were weary, for wherever men are 
looking Godward, there Thou art. Here let 
us realize that the whole universe is Thy tem- 
ple, in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen. 



^ PRAYERS USED 

OUR Father God, we are in Thy presence 
in an especial way this morning, touch- 
ing one another's Hves, looking to the same 
God, but from such different points of view. 
Thou knowest all of us and everything about 
us and in us, and we are thankful that this is 
so, for Thou art all-merciful and all-kind. So 
this morning we come to Thee with the united 
song which we have offered as our praise to 
Thee, but we bring to Thee in this hour of 
prayer our open lives, the things we do not sus- 
pect, the things that Thou alone knowest about. 
Make this hour an hour of great, tender search- 
ing, of healing, of helping, in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OGOD, our Father, into what an atmos- 
phere of home and hospitality and divine 
love we are come. We were fearful when we 
came that our mistakes would keep us from 
entering Thy doorway, but Thou dost welcome 
us because Thou art our Father, and because 
we are overwhelmed and sad-hearted at our 
mistakes. We were afraid that our sins, 
deeper and more redly stained than our mis- 
takes, might keep us from Thee, but Thou dost 
say as we come, " Come unto me, and I will 
wash away your sins and I will make thy soul 
whiter than snow." We were not afraid that 
our sorrows would keep us from Thee, for the 



AT THE OPENING OF SERVICE 45 

most sorrowful of men was Thy Son and is 
Thy Son yet stretched upon His cross, our Re- 
deemer. We are here because Thou art our 
Father, because we are Thy children. Let 
none of us be lost, let none of us fail to feel 
the warm light and flame of Thy love. None 
of us is so weakened, none of us so far astray, 
but that Thou dost come with Thy redemption 
for us, and Thou dost search upon the moun- 
tain and amidst all the stones and briers for 
the lost sheep. Let this morning be a morning 
of return, therefore, in the name and for the 
Name's sake of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we redeem our promise: we will 
'' call upon our Lord and our God and 
complain unto him," for we may not bring the 
things of our hearts and lives to any one else 
with such complaints as may be heard and un- 
derstood. Thou knowest all of all of us, and 
all of all we love and all of all we would help. 
We bring the sorrow and tragedy of life unto 
One who understands from the beginning and 
along through the joy for which we thank 
Thee and the ministry of this sorrow and this 
pain. We bring to Thee in the making, char- 
acters for which Thou hast done so much at 
the beginning and all the way along through 
our lives, for which we thank Thee, — asking 
Thee to mold, to repair, to set straight, to bur- 



46 PRAYERS USED 

nish, to glorify for Thy throne, in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we are Thine, Thine even yet, 
whatever have been our mistakes or sins, 
still we are Thine. We are prodigal sons, but 
sons, wandering daughters of Israel, but still 
Thine, Thy children. We come back into the 
hands that shaped us at the first in these hours 
of worship. We are indeed like clay in the 
hands of the Potter, but not hopeless clay, for 
the Potter is hopeful. We are Thine. Thou 
art our God. O in this fellowship this morn- 
ing, may there be a renewal of life, a readjust- 
ment of all that needs draining out and refash- 
ioning, but may this work be done by Him who 
holds the seven stars in His hand, even our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



PRAYERS USED DURING 
SERVICE 



" Be my tent arid in Thy covert, keep me from 
the tempest's war." 

OLORD, we are praying with these songs 
most effectively, for these songs give ex- 
pression to that which no words may speak or 
divine: our upward longings, our sense of 
shortcomings, and the value of the spiritual 
powers that are the regnant powers of the uni- 
verse. 

We thank Thee as we sing for a singing re- 
ligion. We rejoice as we praise Thee for a 
religion that means the extinction of evil. The 
shadow shall flee away, and that immortal sub- 
stance of good which is God Himself reveal- 
ing Himself in all life, shall abide forever. 

O, let us this morning hide in the covert! 
Let us find the warmth and kindliness and wel- 
come under the shadow of that wing ! May we 
recognize the fact that Thou dost not and will 
not see it as permanently belonging to us. Let 
us leave it behind, pressing on through our 
Lord, Jesus Christ, through every kind of 
goodness and power. 

We ask it in the Name of Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. Amen. 

49 



m PRAYERS USER 

''In Thee, have I trusted. Let me never be 
confounded/' 

OLORD, God of Order, of Light, we pray 
Thee hear our prayer that we may be 
dehvered from confusion ; that we may indeed 
never be confounded, and hear that prayer, we 
beseech Thee, in spite of our recognition that 
nothing but our wrong-doing permanently con- 
fuses us. Hear our prayer, especially. Heav- 
enly Father, because even if we are con- 
founded and lie in direst confusion because we 
have done wrong, Thou art not confused. 

Thine eye seeth through all our gloom. Thy 
hand hath reached through all the confusion. 
Thine own voice stilleth the tempest. Thou 
hast given us Jesus Christ, that we may be 
calm, self-controlled, loyal and pure, in His 
Name we ask for Thy blessing, and guidance. 
Amen. 



** And triumph over death, and thee^ O Time" 

OLORD God, Father of Eternity to whom 
Time is as a wave of the ocean, and our 
times as but drops in the Sea Everlasting, 
dispose our minds, we pray Thee, to the 
high emprise as such thoughts as these 
and as we look this morning upon any 
who may be returning home with a sad 
history and a glad future or upon any 
who may have failed. Living at Thine 



DURING SERVICE 61 

own house and at Thine own table, in the 
heavenliness of the Father's Home and for 
what it stands, may we be children not of 
Time but of Eternity. May we learn not to 
postpone for some blessed thought of the fu- 
ture our triumph over Time. May we this 
morning learn to triumph over death by living ; 
over chance by taking the divine order as the 
rule of our life, and over time by asking no 
questions of to-day or to-morrow or a year or 
an age, but asking only to be whispered to 
from the bosom of Eternity. '* How shall the 
thing strike you and me in the house not made 
with hands?" May we take the modern 
psalmist's word and say it at every crossroads 
of life: "How shall the thing strike you and 
me in the house not made with hands? " 

O God, we are moving on with joy; we are 
coming nearer constantly to the larger, sweeter 
views of Thy presence. We beseech Thee 
now, this morning, to enfold us in the warmth 
and comfort and safety of Thy love. We ask 
this blessing through our elder Brother, our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

''Mighty Ruler, Mighty Lover ^ Mighty 
Saviour.'^ 

LORD God of our salvation who givest us 
this mighty Saviour and this mighty 
Ruler because He is the mighty Lover of our 
hearts and of our lives and all our fortunes, we 



62 PRAYERS USED 

come with our gratitude this morning and ask 
Thee to bless us by such a touch from Thine 
own hand who gave Him that we may give our 
lives unstintedly, freely, with all joy and satis- 
faction to the mighty cause of this Ruler, this 
Lover and this Saviour. We know, O Father, 
when our lips use these great words of song, 
when into us there pour these new visions 
wrought by these melodies, how unworthy we 
are. Grant us Thy guidance, we pray Thee. 
Amen. 

" God so loved the world, that He gave His 
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in 
Him should not perish, but have Everlasting 
Life." 

ALMIGHTY Love, we thank Thee for 
this song and its story. What a world 
it is to live in, if the greatest sorrow that we 
have, the darkest doubt, the most severe afflic- 
tion, the heaviest burden may all be brought to 
Calvary! We may know what pain means, 
what the accomplishment of the divine desire 
shall mean in the glory that is to come. If we 
are in such a world, all within the bosom of 
Thine own love, all within the gracious circum- 
ference of Thine own pity, all within the 
warmth of Thine own eternal springtime and 
hope, how shall we live? What heroisms we 
may have within us, unborn, shall suddenly 
spring into life, and what latent manhood and 



DURING SERVICE 5B 

womanhood are there, shall breathe forth songs 
for everybody. Lord, may we live in this at- 
mosphere! Forgive us that we have been in 
any other atmosphere ; " for God so loved the 
world." There is something more than the 
troubles we have brought here this morning; 
something more than the thing that dogs us 
from place to place and follows us; there is 
something more than the fact of our personal 
failure. 

O God, Thou art, and Thou hast so loved the 
world that we accept it all and give up doing 
alone and working alone and bearing alone, 
and we accept Thine offered partnership in our 
life, through Jesus Christ. Amen. 



" These are they that came out of great tribu- 
lation/' 

WE are thankful to Thee, Almighty God, 
that the story of infinite love is a story 
of such conquest and such victory. We open 
the Old Book with its strange traditions and 
we read of the curse and the thorns that came 
after the Garden of Eden, but we thank Thee 
that love comes along and by its almighty 
transformations reveals in the crown of thorns 
a crown of goodness and mercy and pity and 
eternal hope, and we rejoice that so great is 
love, so transforming in all things, that there 
shall be no more curse and instead of thorns 



64 PRAYERS USED 

there shall come up the fir tree and all peace 
and joy shall come by and by in the conquest of 
that Love which wore the crown of thorns. 

We ask Thee this morning, Heavenly Fa- 
ther, by Thy good Spirit, to bring our spirits 
close to this Truth. May we not war against 
the cost of human progress; may we, as we 
study together, seek to join the army of the 
Lord God, and by and by we shall hear the 
song: ''These are they that came up through 
great tribulations and have washed their robes 
and have made them white in the blood of the 
Lamb." 

We are here to lift our prayer to Thee for 
those who are dear to us, for those who are 
sick and needy, and especially we ask Thee, O 
Lord, to bless those in this congregation who 
have lost dear ones from their side ; we pray to 
Thee to help us all who are in the first intima- 
tions of grief and who realize that we are with- 
out mother or father or husband or child or 
lover. But the great Lover is all these. Jesus, 
Thou Little Child, come and take the place, not 
to the exclusion of our little one, but in order 
that we may see the immortal little one in 
Thine own arms, as Thou didst say, " Suffer 
little children to come unto me." O, Thou 
Great Lover, wilt Thou stand by the side of the 
stricken and lonely love and by Thy mercy and 
grace succor and comfort them that are upon 
these hard and rough waves as once through 



DURING SERVICE 56 

Jesus Christ Thou didst make the waves be 
still. 

We ask all these things in the Name of 
Christ, our Lord and our Redeemer, Amen. 

*' Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God, 'Almighty^ 

THOU all-holy One, if it were not for Thy 
love expressed in Christ Jesus our Lord, 
we would be afraid and would cringe and fal- 
ter and go away from Thine altar. If it were 
not that upon Thine altars is a sacrifice made 
not by ourselves to propitiate Thee, but by 
Thine own self to win us, surely there would 
be no worshipful heart. Each would go away 
afraid and forever away. But because Thou 
art holy Thou hast been true to Thine own 
nature and for Thy Name's sake Thou hast 
redeemed us. Thou hast offered the sacrifice 
not to propitiate, but to woo and win us; to 
show us what sin costs all the time and to bring 
us back by a way that shall make us forsake 
our sins and sinfulness and make us love Thee, 
Thou Holy One. And it is said that the Gift 
Thou didst make upon the altar is the Holy 
One. So in the atmosphere of this mighty 
song which has filled the generations with new 
impulses for music, we cry unto Thee, " Holy, 
Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, who wast 
and art and is to come.'' We adore Thy holi- 
ness in the love and mercy and brotherliness of 
Qur Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen, 



56 PRAYERS USED 

'' In the shadow of the cloud, so chill and dim, 
we are clinging, loving, trusting." 

IN the shadow of the cloud, O God, our Fa- 
ther, we find some of our friends this 
morning, and we bring to Thee a prayer for 
them. We ask Thee to bless the young ones 
who have looked out into life with such happi- 
ness and joy, as they look into a little grave. 
We ask Thee to bless them who af e in the thick 
of the battle of life, who, for the first time, are 
fatherless and who have learned to fight under 
a shield loved by the family who have looked 
into the eyes of the Father for so many years. 

O Lord, we ask Thee to bless this morning 
those who have the disappointments that Thou 
knowest by name and that we do not know 
save in the haggard face, the tired body, and 
the broken spirit. We ask Thee this morning 
to bless those w^ho are in the sorrow of genuine 
repentance because of evil deeds. 

We ask Thee for these blessings, because 
Thou art the God of all, and we have the 
promise this morning that Thou dost edmfort 
us in all our affliction. We hear the word: 
" He knoweth our frame. He remembereth 
that we are dust.'' We give to them, O God, 
all the sympathy of brother-men, with all the 
love of motherhood and wifehood and girl- 
hood, with the ten thousand experiences that 
T one of us may comprehend, but that Thou 
3t altogether, and we ask Thy blessing 



DURING SERVICE 67 

upon these and all who are in trouble, as we 
think of our comfort this morning. In the 
Name of Him who is the Comforter — even 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



Text : '' Babylon was a golden cup in the hand 
of the Lord:' 

OUR Heavenly Father, after reading Thine 
own Word and after coming into rela- 
tionship with this fact as in the more modern 
days men continue their life under Thy provi- 
dence and by Thy grace, we pause to thank 
Thee that Thou hast such power — the power 
of all goodness and the power of all truth, but 
above all the power of love, Thine own nature, 
to bring out in all the ore, with its stubborn- 
ness, with its sharpness and its coldness and 
hardness, the pure gold. We thank Thee that 
we have nothing to come with, oftentimes, but 
a cup of gold which is not golden, but we re- 
joice that many of us in the darkest experi- 
ences of to-day may find something some- 
where, something that is gold, but something 
that has in its history nothing but the frightful 
association of wrong — a very Babylon. 

O Lord, before we go away this morning, or 
at any other time, may we inquire of Thine 
own power, and before we yield may this be 
our prayer: that we may come into such a fai^ 
as to know that the goodness of God shall- 



58 PRAYERS USED 

pass 'round about us. So shall we come nearer 
to Him who took the poor, broken world to 
Him ; took a world w^hich had indeed been full 
of golden possibilities, a world which He did 
not cast away, but He redeemed a world of 
hope. 

We ask in the Name of Jesus Christ, our 
I.ord. Amen. 



'" And triumph over death, and thee, Time," 

OTHOU God of Eternity, how sublime is 
the religion of Thy Son. What mar- 
velous facts are these that come to us so finite, 
too weak to bear their weight, and yet Thou art 
within us, helping us to bear the superior 
weight and importance of these majestic ideas. 
We thank Thee for the triumphant soul; we 
thank Thee for the experience of being able in 
time to so have the relish and taste of eternity, 
to so have given ourselves to that which is im- 
mortal that we do here and now betimes tri- 
umph over time. We thank Thee for the 
brave and the true, for the good and the beau- 
tiful, for the holy and the wise who scorn 
time's judgment, who will not permit the dic- 
tation of a day or an hour's opinion, but who 
appeal in their lives to eternity and ask the 
judgment of the everlasting and so triumph 
over time. We thank Thee for the affection, 
we thank Thee for the inspiration, we thank 



DURING SERVICE 69 

Thee for the instruction that comes out of eter- 
nity and, enfolded as our earth is to-day in all 
the soft, sweet brilliance of this morning, we 
move on in the eternal. By and by dates shall 
cease. O, help us, Heavenly Father, to be so 
acquainted with the eternal, to have so accus- 
tomed ourselves to breathe in the eternal that 
when death comes and life opens and all is over 
with time, we shall live accustomed to the eter- 
nal. So let us take to ourselves at the begin- 
ning of our prayer and faith, Him who is the 
Life Eternal of all — our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



''I shall tent on Lovers Highway'' 

HEAVENLY Father, as we consider such 
a consolation, we wonder at Thy glory, 
we adore Thy power, we bow in reverence be- 
fore a love so tender and so victorious! As 
we see the Highway of Holiness, we know it is 
the King's Highway, and we bring our unsub- 
jected lives this morning — the poorest that 
Thou mayest make it the richest; the richest 
that Thou mayest make it the humblest; the 
fairest that Thou mayest make it the most serv- 
iceable ; the most musical that Thou mayest put 
it, if Thou wilt, in the place of discords and 
tumult to make the world musical, and for this 
we give Thee our thanks in the Name of 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



60 PRAYERS USED: 

*^ He sendeth the springs into the valleys, that 
run among the hills," 

OLORD, we thank Thee that nature is the 
cup which Thou dost fill and that the 
cup overfloweth, Thou immanent God, and 
Thou transcendent God, Thou who fillest na- 
ture until she blossoms with beauty and fra- 
grance, Thou who fillest the universe until the 
stars glow and quiver with light, Thou who 
dost speak to us in the morning wind and in 
the evening dew, Thou who art greater than 
anything Thou hast done. Thou who art in 
nature and through nature and more than 
nature, in whom nature is. Thou great Spirit 
who fillest nature with Thyself, we come to 
Thee in our thought. We climb up from this 
song through the frost and vapor, through the 
springs that Thou placest in the valleys for 
songfulness to Thee. Here we know Thee, 
central, supreme God over all, blessed forever. 
We would know Thee through our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

"" / only know I cannot drift beyond Thy love 
and care/' 

OTHOU who guidest every one of us, 
Thou who knowest every one of us and 
in what little shallop or sea-going craft of 
greatness we are, we give Thee all our 
thanks that we cannot drift beyond Thy love 
and care. We thank Thee for the perpetual- 



DURING SERVICE 61 

ness of Thy mercy, for the sweetness of the 
belief which is perennial from the blossoms of 
Thy love. Great God, make its appeal to us 
this morning so that we shall rally all the 
forces within ourselves, so that deep shall cry 
unto deep, water shall cry unto sky, deep an- 
swering unto deep — God and man in one sweet 
and holy confederation of forces; the partner- 
ship of divine and human which we know in 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



" Fm a pilgrim, and Vm a stranger, I can tarry, 
I can tarry but a night," 

WE are grateful for the pilgrimage of life. 
O God, we thank Thee for the inspi- 
ration that gushed like springs in freshness of 
water. We thank Thee for all that lies before 
us and makes our movement sublime if we are 
heavenward going. We thank Thee for all 
that we take with us of the history of the past, 
for consecration of hum.an experience in the 
forward movement. Lord, we pray Thee this 
morning that we rriay so set our faces toward 
that Otherwhere of achievement, of success, 
of blessing and of sanctity that whatever may 
have been our lives in the past, there shall be 
a complete transformation of all that may have 
happened — our sorrows, our sins, our joys and 
our mistakes into the power that shall make us 
sing as we go on our pilgrimage. We ask this 



62 PRAYERS USEI) 

in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 



'" Fierce was the wild billow.^* 

OTHOU Christ who art with us in the 
boat, we thank Thee for the storm itself, 
knowing that Thou art with us. We thank 
Thee that there are such forces in our world, 
such meanings in life, such straining of the 
mast, such perils of the waves, because we are 
on our way somewhere, because life has such 
distinct and great meanings for time and eter- 
nity. May we worship in trust of God our 
Father, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
Amen. 

" Blest he the tie that hinds'' 

OLORD, while we come hither this morn- 
ing together and thank Thee for Thy 
mercies and rejoice in this place of prayer and 
praise, we remember those that are not here, 
we remember all the sacred ties that have 
bound us here and are binding us to Thee 
wherever we go or when we stay. May there 
be one song that shall reach from earth to 
heaven: ^'Blessed be the tie that binds our 
hearts in Christian love and when we asunder 
part it gives us inward pain '' — Lord, may we 
have that hope that we shall meet again and 
may we know that we cannot wander far from 



DURING SERVICE 63 

one another while we kneel at the altar, that 
friendships never break, that the sweetest and 
holiest things of earth are to be taken up into 
the heaven. We shall begin in the morning 
time of heaven in the perpetual joy of our re- 
ligion. We pray in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

EACH one of us personally brings to Thee 
nothing less than the problem of himself, 
and, O Lord, if we had not the grace of God 
stimulating us, strengthening us, guiding us, 
restraining us, we would not have been here 
praying for Thy love. We thank Thee for 
this grace of God. We pray for the pardon of 
our sins, for the purification of the Holy 
Spirit ; we pray for all those, O Lord, to whom 
our hearts go in our sympathy and who have 
asked for an interest in our prayers, in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OLORD, we would not hide from our- 
selves and we may not hide from Thee 
the fact that we have sinned, that we have 
come short of Thy glory, that we have failed 
miserably in our own strength, but we know 
that God is Lord over all; that sin is the 
shadow; that the substance is the Son of 
Righteousness. We do not believe, O Lord, 



64. PRAYERS US EI) 

that there is any even battle between what we 
call sin and what we call goodness. We know 
that the battle has been fought and the victory- 
won — won for us on Calvary. May we this 
morning, O Heavenly Father, rejoice that we 
are invited into the fellowship of His suffer- 
ing, that we may be indeed His brethren and 
sisters. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Father in heaven and on earth. Fa- 
ther of our spirits who shall be with us 
everywhere and at all times, may this Amen 
which has gone up from our souls be the an- 
swer of our whole life to the claim of divine 
holiness. "Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou!" 
'' Lord God ! " And Thou dost come unto us 
in Jesus Christ, our Lord, saying unto us, 
" Wilt thou be made whole,'* and we bring to 
Thee our partialness, our f ragmentariness, our 
brokenness, for we are not whole and we would 
be made whole. We would be made ready for 
the City Four-square by being made whole, all 
our faculties in harmony. But what shall at- 
tract these powers out of the relationship, build 
up these walls that are down, and make us 
four-square and whole but Thy holiness? So, 
Lord, we appeal to the holiness that else would 
smite and burn and destroy, to save, soothe and 
succor in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



DURING SERVICE 65 

I—— II 

OTHOU Who art enthroned in the heaven 
of heavens, Who art and shall be ever 
more the Friend and Companion of trusting 
hearts, Who dost come to live with Thy chil- 
dren. Who dost make a dwelling place in the 
soul of man, Thou Who hast developed in man 
the sense so reverential of worship, O may our 
Psalms be Psalms of worship, and to this end 
may Thou take away all sense of discord by 
giving us again the Lost Chord, and by giving 
us who have never found it the chord of Thy 
Being, harmony with Thyself. May we be 
lovers, as Thou hast loved us ; may we walk in 
the path of Him who taught us always to walk 
in the path of things by which we give our- 
selves to friends. May we live in times of dis- 
order, ordered by the Lord. We ask in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OTHOU God who bringest us together, 
who hast remembered us of old, who 
prepared for us the salvation which is in our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, may we have 
but one thought this morning as we look into 
our lives, and that is that without Thee we can 
do nothing. May we bring this morning even 
the disasters and mistakes of all our lives to 
Thee. May we go back up to Sinai if when 
we have come down from the heights of con- 
science we have failed. O Thou repairing 



(66 PRAYERS USED 

■ 

God, we bring to Thee the broken wheels of 
our chariots of fire. O Thou HeaHng God, we 
bring to Thee the wounds that we have made 
upon our own character. O Thou Saving 
God, we bring to Thee our losses that per- 
chance are the best things we have, if we bring 
them to Thee in faith. We bring them to 
Thee in faith because Thou hast spoken to us 
with such sympathy and pity, through our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OTHOU unhasting God, Thou who know- 
est the poise of omnipotence, Thou who 
hast the calm of perfect knowledge, Thou who 
lovest us, we pray Thee not for the rest of 
dissolving ideals, not for the rest of fading 
principles, not for the rest of the grave of our 
ambitions and our hopes, but for the rest of 
that full life, that complete service, that utter 
loyalty that is to be ours, through Jesus Christ, 
our Lord and Saviour. Amen. 



WE beseech Thee this morning, Heavenly 
Father, as Thou lovest us, to pardon 
our sins, to cleanse us from all iniquities, to 
support our faith in receiving Thee, knowing 
that where Thou art there shall be no evil. O 
God, may we not undertake alone with false 
definitions of life to fight and combat our in- 



DURING SERVICE 67 

iquities, but may we just receive them and so 
use the reserves of the Almighty and the re- 
sources of grace that we shall conquer in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father, what stretches for 
imagination, what lands for faith, what 
oceanic distance for all our hope forever and 
ever. How the human heart ever invented the 
word, the response to it all, ''Amen '' — so let it 
be, without Thy grace, and without Thy provi- 
dence and love, we cannot conceive. We are 
here in the midst of the mystery that such ideas 
have ever occurred to the human soul. We 
can understand how the kind of man getting 
out of all its transgressions emerging from the 
gloom of the past, slowly coming into the light 
of self-consciousness, should approach the un- 
derstanding of the appeal of goodness and the 
desirableness of all that is true and lovely and 
holy, that by and by there should come a song, 
" Worthy is the Lamb that is slain to receive 
blessing and honor and power." 

But, O God, our Father, where did we ever 
get the idea of " forever and ever " ? Thou 
didst give it to us. Thou hast given to us the 
most solemn of Amens, so let it be, so shall it 
be, in the person of our Lord, Jesus Christ, for 
everything, O Lord, that Thou hast given unto 
us in Him Thou hast given unto us to say to 



6S PRAYERS USED 

our own hearts, " The best shall be so." So 
we come this morning, O Lord, in His Name 
and by His strength. Amen. 

OTHOU God of Holiness, Thou who art 
perfect, Thou whose dazzling pureness 
puts a vast, deep shadow upon the ground 
where we walk because of our impurity, 
cleanse our hearts, we beseech Thee, and take, 
we pray Thee, into Thine own great and tender 
keeping the concerns of our characters. O 
Lord, we would have the things about us to 
please. We lift up our eyes often to the tem- 
ples of beauty and rejoice, but this morning 
and in this presence, dragging here, as we do, 
after us the memory of guilt and wrong-doing, 
we ask for Thy cleansing power and we pray 
for the forgiveness of our sins in the Name of 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY One whose name is love, 
these words which have come to us out 
of Thine own holy Word remind us that we 
must not misinterpret love. O, Father in 
heaven, grant that our shadows may not fall 
upon the dearest thing we have in earth, that 
we may not project out of ourselves some 
meanness to bemean the noble. To this end, 
O Lord, wilt Thou reveal Thyself through the 
power of Thy love and the generosity of the 



DURING SERVICE 69 

Gift which Thou hast made to us through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

OGOD, it is to the generous hand, to this 
most generous heart of the universe, to 
this generous power to redeem us that we bring 
the memory of our sins and our shortcomings 
and our failures. To Thee alone we confess 
them and to Thee alone, O God, we bring all 
the consequences which have followed in their 
train. Forgive us our sins, we beseech Thee; 
pardon all our iniquities; give us, we pray 
Thee, a new song ; set us forth on new errands 
of joy, of faith, through Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. Amen. 

OTHOU most generous God, who seeth us 
in our afflictions and knowest our grief, 
we beseech Thee to take every bruised heart 
and heal it, to take every lame one and put him 
in the way of strength, to give sight to the 
blind and hopes to the hearts of men. We 
pray in the Name of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OGOD, who knowest what every day is, 
and who fillest with all the concerns of 
eternity the hours of each of our days. Thou 
who especially art near to the trembling heart 
to-day wishing to know the issues of to-day, 
half dreading the conclusion of to-day, take all 



70 PRAYERS USED 

our days, we pray Thee, — a poor gift indeed 
from us — until, like cups that thirst for the 
dew-fall, they are filled; and fill our days, we 
beseech Thee, with the gift of Thy grace from 
above. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Eternal Friend, whose fields are 
everywhere, stretching throughout all 
eternity, whose joys are the joys and field 
flowers and field scents, take us this morning, 
we pray Thee, into the larger places of the day. 
We would stray away this morning under Thy 
guidance, and while we stray we have our hand 
in Thine, looking for mercies, finding the rich- 
nesses of Thy grace, going from pool to pool 
where Thou dost give living water, and finding 
in hillside and glen and everywhere the pres- 
ence of our God. Soothe those that are fevered 
with care. Bless those who feel they are un- 
worthy to follow Thee ; give the word of com- 
fort, we beseech Thee, to those who are dis- 
traught and weary with the weight of sin, and 
may we be guided in our thoughts and pur- 
poses, as always, for the sake of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OGOD, as we come into the presence of 
these infinite truths and infinite promises 
and infinite realities, and especially as we stand 



DURING SERVICE 71 

in the presence of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, 
with His almighty forgiveness, we are stricken 
at the heart with the recollection of our sins. 
We have wearied Thee. Nay, Lord, only love 
is unwearied — Thy love with the multitude of 
our blunders, the errancies of our feet and the 
willfulness of our hearts. O, God Almighty, 
we pray Thee to grant us the good Spirit from 
above, that we may always walk in the way of 
our Master, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 



ALMIGHTY God, we have praised Thee 
in our song; we have brought to Thee 
these tones out of our hearts, and we rejoice 
again and again and forever more shall rejoice 
in the songs of our faith. We thank Thee for 
the irrepressible music of redemption. We re- 
joice not in any speech or in any building; not 
in anything of color or of line, but only in the 
song that shall last forever and shall be re- 
sumed in heaven. May the great things of life 
be told. We thank Thee for the songs of the 
wedding; we thank Thee for the song of the 
birth, for the songs of baptism, for the songs at 
the grave's edge — but we thank Thee most for 
the songs in the night. Thou hast given Thy 
servants songs in the night, and so to-day, with 
all our experience of night-time, whether we 
are at vespers or at matins, we are come with 



72 PRAYERS USED. 

II — 

songs. Receive them, we pray Thee, our Fa- 
ther, in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE thank Thee, O Lord, that every 
mountain height and every plain be- 
comes a place of new privilege and if we are 
thankful for the things that are past may we 
be more arduous about the things that are to 
be. May we, if we have risen to a point where 
we give these songs this morning, go still 
farther by Thy grace, and may we to this end 
leave every unnecessary burden behind and so 
carry only what Thy providence dost give us to 
carry. And by Thine own spirit, O Lord, wilt 
Thou so influence us that we will cast our bur- 
den on the Lord, even though we know that 
every one shall bear his own burden and that 
we are commanded to bear one another's bur- 
den. Father, we pray Thee in these times of 
great concern that we may not be seeking to 
bear the burdens that Thou must bear. Lord, 
let us know that this thing of civilization was 
from the beginning a divine adventure; that 
Thou hast invested in it and that Thou hast 
never withdrawn the capital of heaven. O 
Lord, may we not try to bear burdens that are 
Thine and Thine only and may we so take up 
the burdens of simple duty and the thing that 
is nearest to us that it shall be more easy for 
Others to bear their burdens. We ask in the 



DURING SERVICE 71 

Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OUR Father God who givest us these top- 
most notes of life because Thou dost fill 
us with the music greater than that of the 
morning stars, grant that our lives be made so 
accordant with Thine own Spirit, with the un- 
known Thou hast for us and in us that we may 
always walk in Thy will and counsels to the 
end. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD, we pray Thee especially for Thy 
blessing upon us in the midst of all our 
life that we may learn to be patient with one 
another and learn to love one another deeply 
for Thy sake. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, 
O Lord, for hastiness, for irritableness, for 
forgetfulness one of another, and may we so 
approach Thy mercy seat at this time that we 
shall know we have been taken into the beloved 
through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OUR Father, God, who art our shield and 
our sword, we praise Thee this morning 
for a multitude of mercies that no man may 
number. We thank Thee for the deliverances 



74 PRAYERS USED 

of which we know and we thank Thee for the 
countless deHverances which Thou hast 
wrought out for us of which we do not know. 
We thank Thee for the moments of pain and 
sorrow and temptation out of which we have 
been mercifully brought. We see only this 
side of the gateway and we rejoice, but, O 
God, we thank Thee for those moments that 
for us were moments of emancipation, mo- 
ments of mercy, moments of great goodness 
for us, moments that make us shiver at their 
significance as we think how often Thou hast 
blessed us. Receive, gracious Father, our 
praise this morning in the Name of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Father, w^e are ever conscious, in the 
presence of these emotions brought up 
by this music for Thy praise, that we are out 
of harmony; that we are out of tune; that 
some of the strings have been broken; that, 
alas ! our fingers wander ignorantly and clum- 
sily over the strings that are left. O God, 
Thou art our musician ; Thou art the only One 
in earth and heaven keeping the tune for the 
tuneless, and so full of goodness and truth as 
to be willing to repair our instruments. Wilt 
Thou give us this repair? — the right move- 
ment, the right tune, the perfect obedience — 
through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen, 



DURING SERVICE 75. 

ALMIGHTY Goodness who art God 
and only God and God alone, whom we 
must worship ultimately if we attach ourselves 
to that which is immortal and omnipotent, we 
thank Thee that Thou hast made the flesh, that 
Thou didst dwell among us that we may walk 
with Thee, that goodness is the same in heaven 
and in earth and on the edges of the pit, that 
any soul clambering up anywhere for simple 
goodness shall find it in the relationship of 
man to man ; that Thou hast set upon this earth 
a great enterprise of unifying a broken and 
discordant universe and that we are to find 
Thee in one another. O Lord, we thank Thee 
for this truth in the midst of flood and fire, 
and we give the loyalty of our hearts, through 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Father God, Thou knowest us all 
and altogether. We know only a few 
of us and perhaps we know the least about 
ourselves. Thou knowest us to the very depth 
and we are grateful also that Thou knowest 
us to the very height. Thou knowest us all 
through and we are not afraid. We feel that 
the sweetest, holiest reflection of the mind is 
that there is One who knowest all, who shall 
know all, He who knowest all, everlasting, un- 
failing Love. Take us into Thy bounty and 
feed us, we pray Thee ; take us into Thy com- 
fort and console us; take us into Thy mercy 



76 PRAYERS USER 

and relieve us; take us into Thy pardon and 
cleanse us. 

O Father, this is our prayer at the first, and 
shall be all the way through this morning, that 
the resurrection power of our Master may re- 
new our lives in Christ Jesus, our Lord. 
Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, our Father, we bring 
Thee our thanks this morning for this 
hour of worship, for this hour of song and 
praise, and hope. We are not here because of 
any goodness of our own, but because of that 
series of providences and those expressions of 
Thy grace which have surrounded us all the 
way. We are stopping here just a little time, 
each one on his path, to look upward and join 
hands in faithful prayer unto Thee, that Thou 
shalt bless us each one according to the need, 
in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. How 
it unites us, O Lord, to think that the One 
Great and Mighty Power of Love knows us 
altogether; how some of us on the way to the 
grave of a friend, father or mother or child or 
sister or brother, wait here for Thy blessing 
this morning. Bless him, we beseech Thee, as 
he journeys hence, and we pray Thee to bless 
those who look out in the midst of the conflict 
or in the early moments of the fray or in the 
close of the great battle itself, and those of us 
who have still to watch and fight — we pray, O 



DURING SERVICE 77 

God, that the Captain of our salvation may be 
near us, shielding us in every temptation and 
yet enforcing in us the power of righteousness 
in the spirit. We pray through our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OTHOU Qod of all beauty who dost speak 
to the earth this morning with such love 
in the sunlight, who hast spoken to the earth 
in the rain, who shall speak again and again in 
whispers and in thunders, who art our God, 
may we recognize that the God of nature and 
the God of revelation, the God of all the stars 
and our little world and the God of the in- 
terior life is One, Eternal, Infinite, All-wise, 
the Love Divine, the Love Unfailing, and that 
as our earth journeys along this morning in 
the summer-time, wrapped in all the sweet 
prophecies of June, so may our world journey 
on in silence of faith wrapped about with the 
mysterious laws of Thy being held in the palm 
of the Great Hand, and may we open our 
hearts to whatever Thou hast for us of sun- 
light or rain. So may we come to the harvest 
time at last with joy, in Christ Jesus. Amen. 

O FATHER, look into our hearts, we 
beseech Thee, and forgive us; forgive 
us of any intemperance of language or of ac- 
tion. Forgive us, we pray Thee, in the midst 



78 PRAYERS USED 

of all the sweetness of Thy life, for any sour- 
ness of spirit or acuteness of speech. Forgive 
us for selfishness in the midst of all the needs 
of humanity. May our hearts throb and throb 
deeply, richly, beneficently, toward those who 
need. May we know brotherhood and sister- 
hood of humanity in all kindness. May we so 
follow Him who is our Light and Life that the 
world shall believe that Thou art again in the 
world. O, Lord Jesus, come again into Thy 
world through Thine own, and manifest Thy- 
self, O God, in the humanity which comes 
through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God whom we do praise on 
high because the highest hast come to us 
through the highest, even our Lord, to us and 
to the highest within us, making appeal to that 
which is loftiest, so that we cry out in prayer 
and sing rejoicing this morning, " Holy, Holy, 
Holy, Lord God Almighty," we bring to Thee 
from all the lower experiences of our lives the 
prayers expressed and unexpressed of our very 
souls, knowing that Thou on high hast proven 
to us the highness and loftiness of Thy divine 
nature by reaching down to us. Now the 
weakest of us comes and the weariest and the 
saddest, the most mistaken, and the most sin- 
ful, crying — ^the lowliest and the highest, — " O 
God of Jesus Christ forgive us our sins in the 



DURING SERVICE 79 

Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen." 

WE bring to Thee, O God, our repent- 
ances. In the midst of all this that is 
harmonious how discordant is much of our 
life; in the midst of all this that is rhythmic 
how much that is unrhythmic in our poor ex- 
istence. We bring much of our poverty to 
Thee because in the great upper places are 
fountains that shalt send their great current 
of life upon our arid deserts. Wherever the 
River of Thy Grace cometh there everything 
liveth. 

Help us to acknowledge our wrongs; help 
us this morning courageously to name to our 
own hearts in the silence of this prayer what 
we repent of. O for the great forgiveness ; O 
for the great love; O for the power to start 
again; O for the divine energy that we shall 
find nowhere else save in our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, our Father and the 
Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, bring- 
ing unto us through Him a sense of our family 
relationships unto Thee, we thank Thee that all 
the relationships of earth are but symbolic. 
They are indeed but the beautiful language 
which we may speak in time and with finite 
utterance of that which abides beyond time. 



80 PRAYERS USED 

We adore Thee, O Lord, that as a mother com- 
forteth so Thou dost comfort. We thank 
Thee for the largeness of Thine own nature, 
so that as an eagle gathereth together her 
young in the nest, beareth them on her wing, 
fluttereth above them, carrying them out into 
the new and unknown, so Thou dost lead Thy 
children by the motherhood of God, in Christ 
Jesus our Lord. Amen. 



OLORD, we pray Thee for our personal 
purity and for the relief of the chains of 
iniquity that are bound to any of us. Why 
should we go along pulling after us great 
weights of memory and self-reproach? Why 
should we carry the chains of anything that 
shall fetter us and keep us from that loftier 
life? O Thou Breaker of Chains, we pray 
Thee to cancel all these foreboding and dark 
fetters. Thou dost take away from us the love 
of our sins. We pray Thee above everything 
to-day that we may be made worthy of these 
forces of growth that are come into the world 
with springtime, that it may be springtime in 
the way we shall leave the past, just as the 
flower leaves the past and dies at once to be- 
come a fertilizer for the future. So let all our 
mistakes be left behind in Thy grace and for 
Thy grace, in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 



DURING SERVICE 81 

ALMIGHTY Father, we rejoice in this 
estimate which Thou hast put upon what 
else were hopeless because so weak and in- 
efficient the world of men and women and 
children. We thank Thee that if we wish to 
find out in any moment of darkness what the 
world is worth we only need to go in the pres- 
ence of the broken body and the shed blood of 
the Christ of Calvary to find out Thine own 
estimate of the world's worth. We rejoice 
that the world's worth is not in the world it- 
self, but in the hands of the Great Artist who 
takes the world and in the palms of love and 
forgiveness remolds the world and makes it all 
His own. We give Thee our thanks, through 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD God, we are always with Thee 
and Thou art always with us, but we are 
with Thee because Thou art with us, follow- 
ing us even in our wanderings, our Rear-guard 
as well as Advance-guard, a God besetting us 
behind as well as before, a God who will not 
let a single enemy be in the camp of Thy good- 
ness that shall foil the goodness and the heart 
and the love of the great heart of Jehovah. 
And while we look out on life. Heavenly Fa- 
ther, we realize that the problems of life are 
so much deeper than the problems of death 
that we would ask, in this moment in the pres- 



82 PRAYERS USED 

ence of all that we love and hope for, for the 
continuance of this personal guidance. 

O Lord, may we be more conscious of Thy 
presence, may we not always be blind and dull 
to see Thee in the things of earth, may we 
not always be dull of hearing, so that we may 
not understand that the footfalls about us are 
the footfalls of our Father! Shall we always 
be so dull in the response to the touch that we 
may not know the hand that is upon us, guid- 
ing us tenderly, molding our lives ; may we not 
more consciously know Thee and follow Thee. 
So we ask that through Jesus Christ our Lord 
Thou mayest be revealed to us in the masteries 
which He has over our lives, in the way He 
shall take the things which are drooping and 
failing, which are fast vanishing from us, and 
recover them by the power of His life, in the 
way He shall visit the very graves of our life 
and make them to respond by a power of resur- 
rection, and in the way He shall take all our 
sins and bear them for us, as He has borne 
them on the cruel cross. This is a great bless- 
ing. It is the blessing we need, a conscious- 
ness that we need. We are in need of Thee, 
every moment — come Thou, now, unto each 
one we pray Thee — our Father. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, our Heavenly Father, 
we thank Thee for the fellowship of en- 
during ideas and for the commandment of im- 



DURING SERVICE 8B 

mortal ideals, but we thank Thee especially 
that we behold these ideas in the flesh and 
blood ; in the history of human greatness and 
nobleness and faith; that it is ours to walk 
side by side with these that were mere abstrac- 
tions were they not our own in those we love 
and in Him whom we adore. O God, as we 
seek to find and attain them, how illusive are 
the best of ideas ; how we follow them in the 
darkness and in the light, and how they are 
ever so far beyond us that we may not have 
communion with them ; but in Him, our Mas- 
ter, our Guide, our Closest, Dearest Friend we 
have all the dearest, all the great ideas. We 
have more than this. We have the Ideal. 
Turn Thou, we pray Thee this morning, our 
eyes, therefore, unto Him, and grant us this 
morning a blessing in the Name of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 



'^ Judge of the nations, he with us yet, lest we 
forget, lest we forget." — Sept, 20, 1914. 

ALMIGHTY Father, we, Thy children, 
assemble here again to thank Thee 
for this fellowship and our faith. We thank 
Thee that whatever has happened since we saw 
one another in the flesh, permanencies of the 
spirit abide. 

We are here this morning, the earth in the 
hollow of Thine hand, the heavens with all 
their constellations within the mighty orbit of 
Thy love. Thou God over all, blessed forever. 
We rejoice in the stability of the unseen. We 
thank Thee that, accustoming our minds to the 
invisible, we are drawn out of the things of 
earth and time and flesh and away from the 
desolation of blood and bone to the things that 
shall be when the last battle is fought and 
when the last shaking of the earth shall avail 
no more. We come this morning because 
Thou hast created us in Thine own image. 
We are of the Spirit; our destinies are spir- 
itual ; our rewards spiritual. 

We come to Thee, O God, once more, and 
beg Thee to forgive us that we have forgotten. 
We sing "Lest we forget'': Lo! we have 
forgotten. We had gone away. We ourselves 
had begun to believe in things of time and 
bone, that physical power was judge ; the great 

87 



88 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

things of the earth were something more than 
dust in the ballast. We pray Thee that as we 
see the futility and the waste and the crime 
and the woe we may humble ourselves before 
Thee and know that we did forget. Wilt Thou 
forgive and forget? We have gone wrong. 
Forget, O Lord, because Thou dost forgive the 
little things in our lives that make us unfit to 
look upon the great problems of our day with- 
out prejudice. Forgive our personal ill tem- 
per; forgive our haste of judgment; forgive 
our willingness to revenge; forgive our desire 
to possess some of the things of time; forgive 
our arrogance ; forgive our trust in the physical 
power. So make each one of us what each 
one of us may be in Thee, Christ Jesus, that 
wherever each one of us is, there will be a 
good man, yonder a good woman, there a good 
child, self-controlled, impassionate, poised, 
calm, peaceful, true. Make this place, O Lord, 
in the days to come a place of calm considera- 
tion. Thine altars we never loved before, we 
think, for we may bring to Thine altars to-day 
things that we dare not bring to any other 
spot of sacredness in the universe. We hear 
Thee telling us " To thine altars, O Israel/' 
May this place of meeting from Sunday to 
Sunday be a place of wisdom. Thy wisdom ; of 
truth. Thy truth ; of devotion to ideals that are 
not shot to pieces in the fray nor stained with 
blood. 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 89 

We ask in the Name of the Prince of Peace, 
who is also the Captain of our Salvation, even 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, because Thou hast manifested 
and expressed Thine own nature in Jesus 
Christ, because looking through the Son we 
see the Father and we know the Father has 
manifested in the Son, we bring to Thee again 
the memory of the fact that our earth is stained 
and stricken with war. O Lord, we pray Thee 
by Thine own power and in such a manner as 
that war shall cease. Wilt Thou lead men 
and women to the consideration of the com- 
mand of our Lord, Jesus Christ; may we hear 
over the storm of battle and shriek of shell the 
Voice saying, " Peace I give unto you. My 
Peace, my Peace I give to you. Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, our Father, lover of 
all Thy children, who dost love Thy chil- 
dren in the midst of their mistakes and their 
sins, who dost bring light out of darkness, who 
dost turn instruments of war Into instruments 
of peace, we pray Thee at this hour summon 
the conscience of our race, and make the wrath 
of man to praise Thee, in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



90 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAB 



Peace Sunday, October 4, 1914* 



ALMIGHTY God, Author of all peace, 
Lover of concord, we bring to Thee this 
morning our world, torn and stained; our 
hearts, repentant and expectant of Thy bless- 
ing; our lives, unworthy of the least of the 
seeds which Thou art ready to sow even in the 
midst of peace and in the midst of the torrent 
of war. We bring to Thee our souls, born of 
Thee, of Thine own sparks from the great uni- 
versal flame of life. We ask Thee to forgive 
us and to bless us ; we ask Thee to direct our 
prayers and our thoughts this morning that 
we may have in Thy presence some under- 
standing of what should be our humility, of 
what also should be our obedience, and of what 
should be our faith in the midst of the clouds 
and the darkness. And we ask all this in the 
Name and for the sake of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



II 

OGOD, who art the Father of all and who 
alone makest men to be of one mind in 
a house, we beseech Thee at this time of strife 
to grant us by the inspiration of Thy Holy 
Spirit a fuller realization of our brotherhood, 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 91 

man with man in Thee. Allay our anger and 
bitterness and deepen in us a sense of truth 
and equity in our dealings one with another, 
for the sake of Thy Son, our Lord, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 



Ill 

OGOD, who hast made of one blood all 
nations of men to dwell on the face of 
the earth, who in Thy Holy Word hast taught 
us that One is our Father, that we all are 
brethren, we pray Thee in this dark hour of 
international strife that Thou wilt open the 
eyes of Thy people, those who in Thy Name 
are entrusted with the authority of govern- 
ment to see and understand their right and 
true relation to Thee and through Thee to one 
another. Teach them that hatred and violence 
are not strength, but weakness; that the true 
safeguarding of a nation is not to be found in 
weapons of war, but in these eternal principles 
which make for truth and brotherhood. Give 
to those who shall suffer in the war which is 
now raging the consolations of Thy Grace; 
heal the sick and comfort the wounded ; minis- 
ter to the dying and bind up the broken heart. 
Bring, we pray Thee, to a speedy end this in- 
ternational battle, and hasten, we pray Thee, 
the time when peace shall flourish out of the 
earth and all shall dwell together in vmity and 



92 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

love and war shall be no more. We ask it in 
the Name of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. . 

IV 

OLORD God of infinite Peace, we 
humbly beseech Thee to look down upon 
the nations now engaged in war. Reckon not 
against Thy people their many iniquities, for 
from the lusts of our own hearts comes fight- 
ing, and war is among us. Look, we pray 
Thee, in mercy upon those immediately ex- 
posed to peril, conflict, sickness and death; 
comfort the prisoners, relieve the sufferings of 
the wounded, and show mercy to the dying. 
Remove in Thy good providence, we beseech 
Thee, all the causes, all the occasions for war ; 
dispose the hearts of those engaged therein to 
moderation, and in Thy great goodness, re- 
store peace among the nations, through Jesus 
Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



ALMIGHTY Love, Thou who alone 
art mighty because Thou art love, we 
thank Thee for the religion of benediction and 
that no music in this world or in any other 
world can make the music of malediction 
otherwise than sad and dark and noisesome 
and wrong. We thank Thee, as we hear this 
old Hebraic song with its revenges, for Him 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 93 

who took the little children into His arms and 
blessed them and did not ask for their hered- 
ity, but out of His outpouring soul of love gave 
His blessing to humanity. 

We pray to-day that as the shadow stretches 
across this world and darkness and woe and 
weariness are all about, that all revenge may 
die away and that the sweeter and holier quali- 
ties may come forth in all these embattled 
hosts. Forgive us. Lord, if we, as a nation, 
appeal from Christian sentiments to sentiments 
of revenge. We ask in the Name of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OGOD, in these moments of great trial, 
in these hours when nations are plung- 
ing with havoc of war against nations; when 
the earth shakes beneath the feet of armies, 
we look to Thee. We pray Thee, in Christ's 
Name, that Thou wilt show us to the establish- 
ment of our faith the attack of all these, the 
earth's afiflictions, to be of Thine own hand, to 
be of Thine own grace. Stay, we pray Thee, 
the progress of everything save the progress 
of truth and righteousness. Answer, we be- 
seech Thee, the prayers of those that mourn, 
the widowed and orphaned of the world. O 
Lord, establish righteousness. May we know 
how much everything costs which is worthy to 
be a banner for our civilization. May we 
know that this is Calvary again, and may we 



94 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

stand reverently and may we as a race, if the 
darkest hour shall come, say as He said, " For 
this cause came I unto this hour." Father, 
glorify Thy Name. And O Lord, when the 
voice in the midnight speaks may something 
be done worth all this cost. We ask in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, Father of all human- 
ity, we bring to Thee this morning tears 
of sorrow and a race afflicted, and we pray 
Thee to turn aside the wrath of man for the 
chariots of the Almighty. We beseech Thee, 
at this time, O Lord, especially, to bless the 
President of the United States and all others 
associated with him in authoritative govern- 
ment. Grant to the people of this country, we 
beseech Thee, the calm that befits an hour of 
such importance in the history of the world. 
Give to our beloved United States such union 
of sentiment in prayer as will dispose us to 
proper procedure in the light of law and lib- 
erty and justice and truth before the throne of 
Almighty God. We devoutly pray in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OLORD, we are conscious of our sins ; we 
are conscious of our weaknesses ; we are 
conscious of dehberate wrong-doing. Each 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 95 

one of us is conscious here this morning of the 
possibilities of such mistakes in life as come 
only from wrong-heartedness. Cleanse our 
hearts, we beseech Thee. Bind us, we pray 
Thee, to the cross of Jesus; tether us, we who 
are wandering, tether us, we beseech Thee with 
all the intimacy of all the love of Almighty 
grace to the one thing in the world which our 
poor old world has distrusted — the one thing 
which in the midst of all the clash of arms 
we have despised; the cross of Christ, self- 
sacrifice. O for one moment of world self- 
sacrifice, for one moment in which selfishness, 
self-conceit, self-appreciation may fade from 
our thoughts. We pray for this in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD, while we pray for others in the 
midst of battle, we pray for the sake of 
others and for the world, for the United States 
of America, for our President and Congress 
assembled, for all the officers who guide and 
enforce public opinion. But above all we pray 
for any who may affect the opinions and ideals 
of the American people, that we may be so 
guided and kept within the bounds of order 
and law, and especially of unaffected devotion 
unto Thee, that we may serve the cause of 
peace and hope of the world, through Jesus 
Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen. 



96 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

WE turn our thoughts this morning from 
these fields of faith, these fields of love, 
these fields of opportunity and grace, to fields 
trampled with hoofs of steel, furrowed with 
cannon and broken in the agony of a great 
contest. Almighty God, Thou art the Ruler of 
the Universe. May we be calm and in the 
hush of our faith may we know that the maps 
of the earth are not made upon the earth; may 
we know that above all the shriek of shell and 
storm of battle is our God. O Lord, pierce 
the gloom with Thy Spirit and comfort. Bless 
the homeless and the orphan ; we beseech Thee, 
staunch the wounds of this poor, blundering 
world of ours, and grant us peace in our time. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

LORD God Almighty, in whose hands 
are the balances of justice and in whose 
heart are the sympathies of the eternal, we 
pray Thee again this morning that peace may 
come into our hearts, first of all to abide there 
and to send all warring and contentious things 
from our minds, to prepare us for the life of 
constructive and beautiful progress, to make 
our lives, lives so white, so pure, and so strong 
that in our battles there shall be no residue of 
blood, no aching wounds but that the wounds 
that have been made shall be staunched and 
cease bleeding and hearts that are broken may 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 97 

be mended as by the Divine Hand of Love. 
So we pray Thee over the earth to stretch the 
sceptre of Thy reign and out of all confusion 
and blood bring safety and peace to the na- 
tions. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, when such a canvas is stretched 
before our hearts as day by day exhausts 
our interest and attracts our attention, we fail 
unless Thou art with us in the little duties of 
life and all the employments and demands that 
come to children and to the weak folk of the 
world. We pray Thee that nothing may take 
from us the consent of our minds with Jesus 
Christ our Lord to make every path of life a 
place in which the lame may walk and every 
way a Highway for the blind in their weak- 
ness, and all our life a life of such response to 
Thy Spirit that wherever we are there may be 
a Gospel, an Epistle, known and read of all 
men. We ask this in the Name of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU Author of all things good, Thou 
to whom evil is but the shadow of good- 
ness, we pray Thee that in these present con- 
flicts men with men, empires with empires, we 
may know there is but one contest in which 
we are worthily engaged, and that is against 
evil in behalf of good. Gird us until like sol- 



98 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

diers of the Almighty we shall march under 
the Captain of our Salvation to a mighty vic- 
tory. We pray in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE lift our voices and our hearts to Thee, 
O God, for any and all that are in per- 
plexity, from him whom we have chosen as 
President of the United States to the least con- 
spicuous and perhaps most sorrowful of man- 
kind. Lord, we thank Thee that even the hairs 
of our head are numbered, we thank Thee 
that Thou dost put our tears into Thy bottle, 
we thank Thee that nothing escapes Thee. So 
we pray for those whom we love and those 
whom we do not love because we have not 
known them, those whom Thou lovest largely 
because they have no other lover in the world. 
May they have the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 
May they walk after Him who has gone 
through the deepest of darknesses and most 
sorrowful of tribulations, even our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE pray Thee this morning, Heavenly 
Father, that our faith may soar even 
above the battle-fields while Thou dost give 
Thy comfort, while Thou dost help us to min- 
ister with our abundance to the want of the 
world. O, wilt Thou create throughout the 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 99 

world an anticipation of a welcome for the 
Prince of Peace! Wilt Thou bring speedily 
to an end, we pray Thee, the sorrow and the 
pain of these distracted times ? We ask in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OGOD of Peace, as we approach Thy 
throne, we see upon the throne the slain 
Lamb, and we know that this sacrifice is the 
vast expense paid and the cost of liberty and 
justice and peace. We pray Thee that if we 
must be reconciled to the shedding of blood 
we may also be assured that out of it all there 
shall come a better day. But we pray Thee 
that we may know Thy truth when with lips 
divine it is spoken. " It must be that offenses 
shall come. Woe unto him by whom the of- 
fense cometh." May our skirts be clear; may 
our hands be white; may the shield of this our 
Nation be spotless; may we all be without 
blame. O God, we pray Thee to stay the 
dreadful tide of battle and blood and death. 
We beseech Thee to restore peace to our world, 
in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

OLORD God of men and of nations. 
Thou hast not only Said unto us, " Bow 
thee in the dust, and I will answer thee; kneel 



100 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAH 

before me, all ye peoples of the earth and I 
will bless you/' but Thou hast said, " Son of 
man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto 
thee." We come after the Easter Day in the 
glory of the first week of our risen Lord's in- 
fluence on the earth to stand upon our feet in 
the self-respect, in the joy and anticipations 
of the new life, but we bring to Thee espe- 
cially. Heavenly Father, as we stand, the 
prayer for national truthfulness, a national pa- 
tience, as well as a national self-respect. We 
pray for Thy blessing upon those who may be 
so soon our enemies in war. We pray that 
Thou shouldst guide them as well as us; that 
Thou subdue passion and pour upon the too 
much and well-nigh explosive elements of rev- 
olution the waters of peace. Let the fires die 
down as we realize in both nations the work 
of our own humanity, the work of creating 
international peace and international honor. 
We ask this, our first prayer ; we ask this in the 
Name of the Prince of Peace. Amen. 

OTHOU God of Peace, we bring to Thee 
again in this place the regrets, the self- 
reproach, the sorrow, yea, the doubt that 
haunts us with regard to humanity and our- 
selves in the presence of this doleful war. And 
we bring to Thee the prayers of our sincerest 
souls that Thou in Thine own might and in 
Thine own time shalt show us what Thou 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 101 

wouldst have us do. Bring the day of the 
great peace. Comfort, we beseech Thee, the 
stricken, the sad, the broken-hearted ; be Thou 
near the wounded and give courage, we be- 
seech Thee, to those who are losing faith it 
may be in the main things of life: in justice 
in generosity, in truth, in virtue, and in peace. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

FAR from the field of conflict which 
amazes our poor world and shakes the 
earth, we bring to Thee our own battles. We 
ask Thee to make it entirely sure in our souls 
that when we are fighting we are fighting for 
the right. We ask Thee to make it entirely 
certain to us that we are of the sword bathed in 
heaven, moving on to the larger conquest of 
ourselves. May we know that He who ruleth 
with His Spirit is greater than he that taketh 
the city. May we so follow the lead of our 
Saviour that more and more we may become 
Christlike in the mighty forgiveness which 
comes through the grace of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 



OTHOU God of all peace, who art our 
salvation because Thou art love eternal, 
enfolding love, hear our prayer as we come to 
Thee with the world in the agony of a new 



102 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

birth as we believe, paying the eternal cost, 
as we beheve, of progress and yet humbled be- 
cause of the wickedness that Thou art turning 
into strength and righteousness by a Provi- 
dence we do not understand. Lord, as we 
stand to-day in the afternoon, it may be, of 
history, looking upon the pillar of cloud in the 
daAtime and the pillar of fire in the night, 
strengthen our belief that Thou dost know 
whither Thou goest with us, and that, knowing 
that Thou knowest, it shall be all in all to us. 
We ask Thee in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

FATHER in Heaven, when heaven seems 
so far away, we bring to Thee the 
prayers of the stricken and the sad, and espe- 
cially those that are in battle arrayed for right- 
eousness, they that are struggling for personal 
purity or personal self-control. We offer the 
prayers that are coming to us in the feebleness 
of our words, but we oft'er these prayers to 
Him who is strong. We know that the hands 
out of which these prayers go are poor and 
ignorant and weak, but we know that the 
hands into which these prayers go are the 
hands of Omnipotence. We pray for those 
who have sent their w^ord of beseeching here 
that Thou mayest answer their prayers and our 
prayers, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
Amen. 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 103 

OGOD, our Father, we pray for the Gov- 
ernment of the United States of Amer- 
ica in these times of great peril. We beseech 
Thee, Thou God of all nations, to give us 
sobriety of judgment, and a love for righteous- 
ness. Take away all fear that we may have 
for anything except that we may come short 
of Thy glory and Thy purpose. Let us fear 
Thee, O Lord, and help us to fear nothing 
else. Father, we pray Thee that in these mo- 
ments when the children of men seem to be 
sundered one from another that some word 
may be spoken by Thy Good Spirit in the si- 
lence between the battle shouts that shall grant 
unto all the world a new and lasting peace. 
We pray in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



WE are thankful to Thee, Almighty Fa- 
ther, we who are in the dark, that '' joy 
cometh in the morning." We are grateful to 
Thee for any experience of darkness or gloom 
that shall bring us into the freshness and glory 
of the dawn light, and we come bringing to 
Thee upon our hearts our nation, the Presi- 
dent of these United States, and the whole 
weary and stricken world, thanking Thee that 
Thine own mighty hand clasps all the tragedy 
of our situation, and that " joy cometh in the 
morning." We pray Thee that we may know 



104 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

and understand that divine power is greater 
than ours, that no accident or incident of time 
must negative the calm eternity of our Father. 
Lord God, v^e leave all in Thine own hands 
excepting the doing of our duty, and we pray 
Thee that every one in all our world of sorrow 
and anguish may look up unto Thee and be 
ready for Thine own word spoken out of the 
midst of the storm and tempest, so that when 
peace shall come to the world, it shall be the 
peace of God that passeth all understanding. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OGOD, what we are most concerned about 
in the presence of these dire forces that 
work with such malady and distress is our own 
part and our own position, our own sin. God 
of mercy, forgive us; forgive us if we have 
sinned against the order that makes society 
safe; forgive us if we have been against Thee 
and Thy Holy Spirit, and if in the midst of 
the tempest we have yielded and have done as 
we wished to do and not as we ought to have 
done, and if our wills have come to be supreme 
in their contempt of Thy law, if we have tram- 
pled upon the ordinances of duty as we have, 
and as we all confess. O God help us to see that 
it is this in our personal lives that provides 
for the storms and the revolutions and the 
blood and the sorrows of love. Forgive us, we 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 105 

pray Thee, restore unto us the joy of Thy sal- 
vation. 

Some o£ us are in great temptation even 
this morning. This is a place of refuge. Our 
boats have come in out of the terrible storm. 
We are frightened even at ourselves. We are 
unable to guide in the darkness and tempest. 
God of Mercy, Christ of Heaven, be Thou our 
guide, that the divine power throughout all the 
world manifested in Jesus Christ may save us, 
rescue us, hold us, hold us against our own 
will, if it must be. We pray in the Name of 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

OGOD of Peace and of Love, how can we 
sufficiently thank Thee for this sweet 
disposing of our minds by the truth from 
above! How real is the ideal; how practical 
is the poetical, when Thou dost shed upon us 
the light of the ideal in the midst of what else 
were sordid and heavy and burdensome in life 
and when Thou art the great poet making 
Thine own numbers to be solved, filling the 
minds of Thy children in the days and hours of 
worship and adoration with Thine own pres- 
ence of calm ! Great God, it is Thy greatness 
in which we nestle. Thy gentleness hath made 
us great. Thou art so tender and kind. Thou 
dost come in such softness of light; Thou dost 
woo us by such sweet persuasion; Thou dost 
come to us with such an appeal — ^half silent, 



106 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

half revealed and half concealed — that Thou 
wouldst not break our wills, but lead them; 
Thou wouldst not crush our personalities, but 
Thou wouldst unfold them as Thou hast un- 
folded the bud of May in the days of July into 
the mossy rose of these days, as Thou hast led 
the grape bursting now in all its purple fullness 
under the touch of life all the way through the 
whitening foam of Springtime in the arbors, 
as Thou art now leading us. 

We thank Thee for the calming power of 
immortal ideas. We glorify Thee, Heavenly 
Father, for the oceanic calm in which our 
noisy little cataracts run. We thank Thee for 
the mass, the magnitude and grandeur and 
depth of the sky above us. Over all the fields 
that are noisy and bloody stretches Thy peace. 
Forgive us, forgive us that we have not been 
true to it all ! Forgive us, we pray Thee, this 
morning that we have been ourselves tumultu- 
ous. Help us now to receive the deepest and 
best blessing from Thee — the blessing of the 
peace that passeth all understanding. Give 
Thy peace to the world through giving Thy 
peace to each human child of Thine. We ask 
in the Name of Him whom we call the Prince 
of Peace — even Jesus. Amen. 

OLORD our Father from whom we re- 
ceive the gift of faith, we believe that 
even in the torn and distracted world of to^ 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR lOt 

day, with its bleeding and its wound, with its 
heart of agony and its feeling of shame, the 
world is yet in the making: Thou art creating 
a new world. We pray that we may look upon 
the cross of Jesus Christ to know the value of 
suffering in the re-creation of everything. 
May we, as a nation, refuse to receive anything 
save the blessing that shall lead us where our 
Master was led when He said, " I, if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men unto me." Fill us with 
the spirit of self-sacrifice; dethrone our na- 
tional greed and boastf ulness ; give us the spirit 
that shall make us brotherly and true, through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



TO Thee, unto Thy holiness, we bring our 
unholy world, strayed away, broken- 
hearted, divided and in the midst of the toils 
and tumults of war. O, for Christ's sake. 
Heavenly Father, restore unto us the peace 
that is of righteousness and give unto Thy 
servants everywhere, those in presidencies, in 
offices of influence, the leadership of Thy Holy 
Spirit, that the world may be Thy world, dedi- 
cated to the uses of humanity through our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE beseech Thee this morning, O Lord, 
that in the midst of the turmoil of a 
world of strife, we may hear the voices of 



108 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

peace and righteousness. O Lord, make us 
vigorous as a nation, strong in our faith that 
without righteousness no peace is worthy. We 
pray Thee, O God, that we may understand the 
meaning of all the events which throng upon 
the canvas to the bewilderment of our poor 
eyesight, that we may understand it by faith 
— faith in the bleeding Lamb of Calvary, sym- 
bol of all progress, where all the atonements in 
the world are guaranteed by Him, our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, with no such voice of praise and 
with no such marching of melody do we 
continue to come before Thee. We cannot 
come always with words which have fallen 
from inspired lips, but we come with unin- 
spired lips for inspiration this morning and 
our call is the call of a great need. The pov- 
erty of our soul comes upon us as a great 
famine; we realize we are in the midst of great 
possibilities with hands too weak to touch 
them, and we are in the midst of commanding 
realities of time and eternity and our hearts 
fail us and our minds are bewildered. We are 
in great need. We are in great need because 
we are asking of men in the midst of these 
times that they shall be close unto the sources 
of power. So we are coming together these 
mornings to find how greatness has cast its 
crown at the feet of the Redeemer; and may 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 109 

we be led in all the events of our lives to the 
loyal worship of that which is good and true 
and beautiful, as Thou hast manifested all of 
these in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OLORD our God, we pray that every in- 
fluence of goodness and every power of 
Thy grace and every kingly tribute of truth 
and justice may be enshrined in these days of 
trembling and trial. The Lord grant to our 
own nation especially the grace to be true, the 
power to be just. May we be fearless in the 
truth; may we know that our God hath been 
from the beginning the God of justice and 
righteousness. Father, may we not ask for 
an easy path and ask to avoid any great duty, 
and, having earnestly pleaded in this place for 
the peace that shall cover the world with a gar- 
ment of a mother's love, and having found in 
these times the warring elements of our nature 
still at work, we pray nov/ that the peace which 
may come to the world may be a lasting one, 
because it may be the peace of righteousness, 
in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father, within the circuit of 
whose loving power are stormy billows, 
we rejoice in the safety of the universe in 
which we live, In the security of law, and in 



110 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

the providence of Thy goodness. '' How firm 
a foundation, ye saints of the Lord. . . .'* 
Such is our song always and especially, Father, 
as we try to be true to the facts of life and 
really see the stormy billows and their fury 
and know that there are untoward and rebel- 
lious forces in the world. Then it is we look 
to Thee. And then we know that no billow 
is as deep as God and no height of ocean's 
spray is as lofty as God and we take to our- 
selves the word of the prophet " But the Lord 
God, but the Lord God, He is mighty.'' We 
bring our halting spirits, our lame thoughts, 
our imaginations w^hich are often appealed to 
by that which is unworthy, and we ask that 
the thought of God shall restore our thought 
from lameness to soundness and strength and 
shall fill our imagination with the majesty, the 
calm, the awe, the greatness that is more than 
of earth and heaven. We ask this great bless- 
ing through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we pray a prayer unto Thee and 
offer a petition that might in some way 
answer in itself our own desires ; we pray Thee 
that Thou shalt lead us in these times of great 
distress. We do not ask Thee to send others, 
but to send us. We do not ask Thee to in- 
fluence from afar so much as to influence right 
here and now our gifts, our symbols, our 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 111 

prayers in their direction. Surely Thou dost 
see a stricken world; surely the pain of the 
time touches some great note of response in 
eternity. O Lord, are we not Thy body? 
Didst Thou not say when some one had asked 
Thee how the human brethren may come to 
Thee when Thou art gone : " He that hath 
done it unto the least of these, my brethren, 
hath done it unto me" ? Lord, show us the 
least of these and help us with willing feet and 
open hands to discharge the obligations of our 
love to Thee, in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE thank Thee, our Heavenly Father for 
all the influence of Thy grace. We be- 
lieve, O Lord, that Thou hast a hand in human 
history that is final and decisive. We believe 
to-day there is a Lord, as out of the cloud there 
comes a gleam of light so strange and so new 
from sources perhaps least expected to send 
this light that the measure of Thy goodness 
may be prophesied in the future. By the will of 
Thy Spirit dispose all the nations of the earth 
to reason. Help us, we pray Thee, to be will- 
ing to consider. Let us not assume that Thy 
Spirit has forsaken any people, and may we in 
these moments when no one is satisfied with 
the judgment of what may be a hostile nation, 
be satisfied with Thee ; satisfied that Thou shalt 
work out through the influence of Thy good 



112 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

Spirit the blessing of peace. This we pray in 
the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ Amen. 

OLORD, we pray that all confusion of 
tongues and that all hostilities as be- 
tween men and men and women and women, 
and even little children, that the enmities of 
the day and generation in which we find our- 
selves may be all swallowed as the night is 
swallowed in the day. May the stream which 
is so perturbed be so lost in the sea that we 
shall find mighty depths and soon, and find 
ourselves in the largeness and beauty of that 
voyage from coast to coast and shall reach 
home at last, in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, in whose evolutions all 
revolutions are bathed in the stream, Fa- 
ther in heaven in whose mighty hand all re- 
belliousness and all disorder are held with the 
calm of love and with the power of a divine 
intention, take Thou the strength wasted, the 
tears shed upon the bloody ground, the agonies 
that cry to heaven. Make Thou out of them 
the concord of the future. Turn, we pray 
Thee, the forces of evil toward good. Let the 
sod which has been made so wet with the lives 
of spent men be the triumphant place of Thy 
goodness. May the wine press which is being 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 113 

trodden by the willing and unwilling feet bear 
the result of Thine own providence. 

Bless Thou the President of the United 
States and those associated with him in gov- 
ernment; grant to all the people who at last 
must rule with their sentiments and opinions 
the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we are in a world of light and 
shadow and Thou hast created the light 
and because of the light there comes the 
shadow. We scarcely know sometimes for 
what we should pray, but we know that ulti- 
mately peace is the order of the going of our 
Father, and we know that peace and peace 
alone shall bring victories to us larger and 
sweeter and greater than all the victories of 
war. O, our Heavenly Father, when the heart 
is sick at the behavior and the ill-considered 
passion and the woe of these moments of in- 
ternational pain we devoutly pray Thee to 
bring out of the womb of darkness and travail 
some birth of justice, some new figure of right- 
eousness that shall rule the world, through our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU God who lookest upon the earth 
and seest the problems of man's life in 
the wilfulness of our humanity. Thou who 
dost turn over into man's hand the awful gift 



114 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

of freedom, the choices that wreck us, we pray 
Thee at this moment of tumult and distraction, 
in these hours of bloodshed, in these moments 
when we look to Thee and do not know what 
to ask, that we may be permitted to ask this: 
that righteousness may fill the earth and that 
righteousness and peace may dwell together in 
men's lives to the honor and glory of Thyself, 
in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

WHILE the earth shakes and the fair 
heavens are stained, while the smoke 
of battle rises to conceal the stars. Thou art 
above it all. Thou shalt guide out of it all the 
forces of eternal benefit. O, may we learn to 
trust Thee. May we know. Heavenly Father, 
that no human hand may stop this desolation ; 
may we be in such prayer all the time that 
Thou shalt be willing and Thou shalt be able 
to give us without loss the blessing of peace 
for all the world. We pray in the Name of 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OGOD, how there stretch from our hearts 
to-day the expectation and the hope so 
often frustrated, the love and the desire so 
often broken in upon, the plans that reach 
around the world. God of peace, God of 
mercy, God of justice, guide Thy poor child. 
Humanity, stricken and bleeding, and may 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 115 

Thine own child, Humanity, rise out of all this 
tumult and distress girded for the victories of 
righteousness. We must leave so much, and 
we are glad to leave all, with Thee. O Thou 
who art above the clouds, Thou who holdest 
the winds of heaven in Thy hand, " clouds of 
darkness are round about him, but justice and 
judgment are the habitation of his throne/' 
Help us in this nation, we pray Thee, each in 
his own place to be where each one of us ought 
to be, to be thinking and feeling as we ought to 
think and as we ought to feel. In the Name of 
the Father, we pray. Amen. 

OTHOU Holy and Loving Father, who 
dost behold the sorrows of Thy children 
and their open wounds, we pray Thee that 
upon every place this earth may know — where 
agony has come and where sorrows abide, 
there mayest Thou stand in the infinite love 
and majesty of Thine own healing power. 
We pray Thee to-day, especially, that in the 
thunder and shock of battle there, above it all 
there may be the open heaven. Forgive, re- 
strain, O God; calm by Thine omnipotent 
love the waves of this angry sea. Forgive us 
all for anything in us that may lead to such 
personal catastrophe and downfall of our faith 
in ourselves. May we hold so closely to Thee 
that in the midst of all these providences we 
shall be able to see a hand and feel its touch 



116 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

and follow its guidance. We pray in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD God, who art the God of battles 
as well as of peace, who above all art 
the God of righteousness and truth, we beseech 
Thee that at this time Thou mayest put upon 
the children of men in their agony Thy hand 
of healing, and, O Lord, if it be the bloody 
sword of Christ, if indeed there be a cross be- 
hind it all on some lonely Calvary and our 
humanity be crucified again and Christ Him- 
self yield up the ghost on Golgotha for the 
larger and sweeter liberty and holy peace, help 
us above all to seek to relieve the wounds and 
sorrows of those who are engaged in this com- 
bat. Lord God, may we not stand here as the 
American people to receive simply the results 
that come to us in coin, that come in dishonor, 
that may come in added wealth and added dis- 
grace, but may all our duties be performed in 
our own country to all the countries of the 
earth, through our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, our God, we bring to Thee the 
issues of life and death, we bring to 
Thee the issues of peace and war. We pray 
for those who are dying that they may live in 
the spirit. We pray for those who are in the 
midst of the contentions of earth that they 
may find the peace of God that passeth all 



PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR llT 

understanding. We pray for the pardon of 
our sins, the inspiration of the Spirit, we pray- 
that the nameless and unnameable blessings 
that we need for our salvation and sanctifica- 
tion may be ours and may be the gift of God 
to all the world in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, Thou who hast touched the 
world with the mystery of Thine own 
mighty plan under which we live and in which 
we behold wonder after wonder, in which just 
now we find calamity adding itself to the rav- 
age of war, O Thou God who hidest Thyself, 
clouds and darkness are round about Thee, 
justice and judgment are the habitation of Thy 
throne. Make us humble, we pray Thee, but 
above all make us kind and may the streams 
of brotherhood go out to-day to those who are 
in want and woe. May war's dark, sad chap- 
ter soon be ended and out of all the crucifixions 
of time may the Lord of Glory come to His 
own. We ask in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we pray Thee in the midst of 
disaster and darkness to lead the path 
of our faith on and ever on. May we not be 
fearful. May we not be turned aside from 
truth. May we desire one thing and one thing 
only: the victory of righteousness and love 



118 PRAYERS IN TIME OF WAR 

and faith of our Lord. O God, our Father, 
bless, we pray Thee, the President of the 
United States; bless all those who stand about 
him for consulting and guidance, but above all 
we beseech Thee to bless the common people. 
As Jesus came and the common people heard 
Him gladly, so we may hear His voice above 
the elements, the voice of our Elder Brother, 
even Jesus, in whose Name we pray. Amen. 



PRAYERS OFFERED ON SPE- 
CIAL OCCASIONS 



New Years 

OTHOU God of Eternity, Thou to whom 
we come and behold the sands of time 
flowing beneath Thine eye, marking the events 
of our lives with the years and uniting to some- 
thing permanent as Thou art permanent that 
which is fleeting, as our acts and even our lives 
are fluent and passing, deepen in us, we pray 
Thee, this morning the sense of Eternity. Let 
us know, O God, from above, by some whisper 
out of the Eternal, the meaning of Time. May 
we realize that we are of yesterday, but that 
the eternal to-morrow stretches before us by 
the nature of our God, and to Him we give all 
glory of our New Year's praise and prayer, in 
the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ Amen. 

ALMIGHTY and ever-Hving God, we cling 
to Thee as we try to tell Thy name to 
ourselves. We cannot pronounce the name of 
the Almighty, save in the terms of our experi- 
ence, as we would pronounce the name of our 
father and our mother and our friends. Help 
us, gracious Lord, this morning to so experi- 
ence Thy goodness. Thy watchfulness, and 
Thy continued mercy guiding us that we shall 
know that He whom we serve we see and hear, 
and call Him our God. 

121 



122 PRAYERS OFFERED 

Father, we are just little children. We are 
handling things of infinite meaning. We know 
Thou dost not ask of us omniscience or om- 
nipotence, but that we should lie down in the 
arms of omnipotence and look up into the eyes 
of omniscience; that we should know in Thy 
knowledge and be powerful in Thy power. 
So make us little children through the child- 
hood of our Elder Brother, Thy perfect Child, 
Jesus. In His Name and for His sake, we 
ask it. Amen. 

TO Thee, O God, we pray, who hast com- 
prehended our whole life in the Gospel 
of Thy Son, Jesus Christ, who hath not left us 
alone with Christmas, with all its beauty and 
fair tradition and its sweet story; because we 
have to live our life with the heights above us 
and on the level plain. We make our roadway 
down through the abysses and across the 
gorges. And there is another side to life be- 
side the greatness of heroism: the richness of 
Thine own spirit in the children of man, and 
we thank Thee that He who came to us the 
incarnate Christmas, bringing to us the Christ- 
mass, bringing to us the very solution of the 
problem of life with its humiliation and its 
meagreness and its straightness — ^we thank 
Thee that He bore our griefs and carried our 
sorrows ; that it was not alone the visit of the 
Wise Men, but the visit of fools, also; that it 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 123 

was not alone the song of angels, but the cry 
of the disgraced and the sorrowful and the 
pained. We thank Thee that He heard not 
only the voice of the Infinite above Him, but 
that He heard the cry of the dying thief. 

Surely He hath borne our grief and car- 
ried our sorrows and knows our pathway be- 
tween these experiences. We ask Thee to help 
us to look upon it seriously, with the utmost 
friendship, in the atmosphere one for another, 
not boasting, but humble. We ask in the 
Name of the Captain of our Salvation, even 
Jesus. Amen. 

National Days 

OLORD, as we see in our time the condi- 
tion of mighty forces and as we behold 
prostrate before us the results of so much of 
our carelessness and thoughtlessness by which 
there have grown up in our national and per- 
sonal life such littlenesses, such dwarfed con- 
ceptions and inadequate ideals as make us 
ashamed to look into the face of a great na- 
tional figure, and as we come to-day, O Lord, 
and remember Thy Gift unto us, we pray 
Thee again to forgive us our sins. Forgive the 
indolence, forgive the ease, forgive the luxuri- 
ousness, forgive the passion for mere joy 
and happiness of the body, forgive us the wan- 
derings of our nation, while we thank Thee for 
Abraham Lincoln, his sincerity, his simplicity, 



124 PRAYERS OFFERED 

in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

WE would know Thee in history, in the 
pages of the past that have been gath- 
ered with all their beauty and inspiration, in 
the flag of our fathers. We would know Thee 
in all those transcendent dreams of the life and 
fortune of man which thrilled their minds, 
swayed their wills and gave unction and power 
to all they accomplished. We would know 
Thee in thankfulness, Father, for such broad 
monuments for patriotism as they have cre- 
ated for us ; we would know Thee, Father, in 
Thy children. Thy great children that have 
given unto us such inspirations and definitions 
of manhood that we cannot look upon this 
flag without remembering them, the flag of 
those who have held and saved and worked be- 
neath it in all the measures of peace. O God, 
as Thy cross is dear to us, so identify the cause 
of the flag in all the future with the cause of 
the cross of Jesus, that our flag may have the 
perfection and safeguarding of that immortal 
symbol, through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

OLORD, we are not unawake to the might 
and wonder of Thy providence in his- 
tory. We have passed a great, golden mile- 
stone in our own national annals. Thou art 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 125 

still stirring the nations of the earth. We 
pray Thee for Thy blessing upon all mankind. 
Unite us, we beseech Thee, as a family around 
a hearthstone where the throne of Thine honor 
dwelleth. Make wars to cease, we beseech 
Thee, but above all make peace honorable and 
just and righteous. We ask in the Name of 
our Lord and Saviour. Amen. 

GRACIOUS Father, the universe of Thine 
own, undespoiled by sin, is full of such 
evident meaning that when our eyes are single 
and pure we seem to be walking in the Heaven 
of Heavens. We know our earth is on the way 
from the terrestrial to the celestial, from the 
lower to the higher. We are in the midst of 
world pain. It is like our own personal life, 
gracious Father. The pain is the pain of prog- 
ress, the agony is the agony of birth. If we 
bleed, it is as the flower bleeds when the blos- 
som comes from the bud. We thank Thee that 
Thou hast given us one Life, one Leader, 
whose whole character and history have been 
such a comfort to us in the long, long ways of 
progress. We see His cross, but just above the 
cross we see the martyr's crown. We see Him 
upon the day of His sorrow, when men fell 
from Him and those whom He had trusted 
were proven unworthy, and yet in that Garden 
of Gethsemane He comes to be the pattern of 
all who have sorrows because there are great 



126 PRAYERS OFFERED 

things to do. Every soldier of humanity has 
been able to lean against Him and see in His 
wounds the long story of sacrifice in the his- 
tory of our planet and our race. 

So we bring to Him this morning, in the 
name of our religion, another laurel crown out 
of American life, another laurel — old; more 
than a century, but fresh and new with blos- 
soms, thanking Thee and thanking our Master, 
our Brother, for this plan of progress. Amen. 

OLORD, in an age when we are likely 
to be attracted by things instead of 
thoughts, may we ask how great men are made. 
May we look to the scarred face on Calvary to 
see molded the mighty leaders of our modern 
manhood. 

Forgive us our sins as American citizens, 
that we have not recognized the value of those 
simple and superb virtues which come back to- 
day with the recollection of more than one 
hundred years. Forgive us, our Father, that 
we have forgotten our duties of men in a re- 
public, the duties of men and women in the 
new dawning democracy, the new duties that 
need to be performed lest the leaders shall be 
leaders of the blind, — blind leaders of the 
blind. Forgive us through the blessing on 
high on the whole nation to-day. Guard the 
life of the President of the United States; 
guard and guide him and all others in authority 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 127 

by Thy gracious love. Give us, we beseech 
Thee, to-day the realization of the enormous 
responsibility of power and help us in all the 
activities of education and charity, that each 
man may feel his own responsibility as in the 
olden times. May every man before his own 
doorway make the pathway safe, and may 
every man by his own gathering of the manna 
in the morning-time have the fresh inspiration 
of divine grace in the Leader of all men and 
the Master of all men, even Jesus. Amen. 



Palm Sunday 

OLORD God Almighty, who art clothed 
with honor and majesty, may the wor- 
ship which we bring to Thee this morning 
clothe again our thought of Thee with the 
honor and majesty of Thy being. O our God, 
whose name and nature is love, who coverest 
with light as with a garment, wilt Thou so 
cover us in all the dealings that Thou hast for 
us and unto us and with us in Thy providence 
with light, that we shall be the children of light 
in Thy presence and for Thy sake. And now, 
O Lord, take enough of the word of Thy serv- 
ant who came to this day of palms without 
losing his insight, without losing his sight of 
Thee. We ask Thy blessing upon us in this 
worship as we look with him through our 
blessings to the Day of Sorrow, out of whose 



128 PRAYERS OFFERED 

depth there comes the rejoicing of all time. 
We pray in the Name of our Lord and Sa- 
viour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Heavenly Father, Thou hast created 
us and redeemed us. Thou knowest us 
altogether; Thou knowest all of us. We 
gather 'round our Father's hearthstone and we 
find our Father's throne in sight, and we know 
that our Father hath declared His Fatherhood 
unto us through His Son, our Elder Brother, 
Jesus Christ. 

We see Him this morning, at the beginning 
of this Holy Week, making all of life holy. 
Father in heaven and on earth. Father of our 
life here and of our life forever, may we not 
in the pride of our life turn aside from the 
teachings as we rehearse them from day to day 
in this week, until the Easter dawn. May we 
be prepared especially this morning for the 
days that are to come, that we may enter the 
gates of that Easter Morning again with 
thanksgiving, as we may enter the gates of 
heaven again with joy ! O, God of Justice and 
of Mercy and of Truth and of Pity, we thank 
Thee that there has been something done of 
such import and of such significance that to- 
day all over the world — in the hamlet and in 
the city, in Orient and Occident, in missionary 
stations and in the great cathedrals, on the sea 
and on the mountain top, — men and women are 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 120 

looking up with a strange, sweet feeling of for- 
giving love. " Surely Thou hast borne our 
griefs and carried our sorrows," Thou Christ 
of God! Help us to feel the pressure and 
command of these facts, as we set out with our 
poor, blundering feet in the way of life. Help 
us, O Lord, to take to ourselves the comfort of 
this fact as the way grows dark and the burden 
heavy. Help us to take this morning, the de- 
liverance of the fact as we mourn our trans- 
gressions ; help us to receive the fact — ^the one 
Fact that has come through the ages unim- 
paired in its beauty and has overthrown king- 
doms and re-created life for Man! Even Jesus, 
our Lord and Master. Amen. 



Easter 

'^ Surely, He has borne our griefs and carried 
our sorrows/' 

WE add to our prayers, O God, the 
thanksgiving of our hearts that we 
have found such a pathway as this to the ever- 
lasting Burden-bearer. We thank Thee, our 
Father, that the Lamb that was slain from the 
foundation of the world is the testimony to the 
fact that Thou hast put Thine own strength 
under our burden. We rejoice in the tender- 
ness with which Thou hast carried this burden 
in the person of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, 
through the Garden of Gethsemane, up the 



130 PRAYERS OFFERED 

steeps of Calvary, into the grave of Joseph of 
Arimathea, to Olivet and to Heaven. 

Make us grateful men and women this 
morning, that beneath everything else Thou 
hast borne our iniquities and below all else in 
the uttermost darkness Thou art carrying our 
burden. Make our lives sacred this morning 
by the help and influence of Him who died, 
that we might have life and life more abun- 
dantly, even Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father of our Lord and Sa- 
viour, Jesus Christ, we are like the other 
children of any family who point to a leader 
who has not been vanquished ; who point to an 
elder brother who knows more than we do, and 
if we call Thee our Father to-day, it is because 
of the fact that there is joy in the truth that 
Thou art the Father of our Lord, Jesus. 

We thank Thee that something comes to us 
out of the recollection of the memory of these 
days past which we have held a fond memory 
indeed — recollections come to us that we have 
a new start, a new beginning place in our im- 
pulse toward goodness — a fresh and strong 
ideal has come upon us, and we here and now 
confess it this morning that it is to be like Him 
who went into the grave and came out of the 
grave with the triumph of immortality upon 
His lips. 

O Lord, we are amidst the dead and the dy- 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 131 

ing. We find all around us the things that 
have passed away apparently, and they are 
very sweet and valuable and good. We are 
seeing constantly about us the perishing ele- 
ments — ^not of this world always, but the 
perishing elements of beauty and truth. O 
Thou enriching God who comes to us this 
morning again with the recollection of these 
past days, show us that nothing can be lost that 
is good. 

But, O Father, we have something else to 
learn this morning. We pray that we may 
learn it with all the cheerfulness of good chil- 
dren! May we learn that while good lives, 
bad dies; may we learn that while good helps 
us to live, bad helps us to die ; that right vital- 
izes and wrong kills. May we stand faithful 
this morning as the facts may castigate us, as 
they may lash us with their truth and as we 
may find out the pitfalls and all the illusions. 
We pray this in the Name of Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. Amen. 

OTHOU Eternal Love who hast given 
Thyself unto us, Father through the 
Son, in order that in the perfect sonship of 
Jesus Christ we may be brothered back into the 
Household, receive this morning, we beseech 
Thee, our thanks and grant unto us the peace 
of Thy pardon, in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



132 PRAYERS OFFERED 

O ASCENDED Christ, we pray this morn- 
ing as to a friend. We do not beheve 
that any distances between those we love and 
our lives should call for cessation of prayer or 
praise. We speak this morning, O Lord, out 
of the stricken heart of humanity, and we pray 
Thee to stretch the scarred hand of Thy sacri- 
fice over all the darkness and tumult of the 
times, and to give us this blessing in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OTHOU God of Peace, who hast made 
peace for us and given us peace within, 
we thank Thee that it is peace with honor, 
peace with justice, and peace with eternal truth 
through Love. We thank Thee that through 
the misapprehensions which have come from 
inadequate religions that have grown up from 
the swamps and marshes of our thinking to 
cloud the fact of Eternal Love, in the sky the 
Son of Righteousness shines forth with heal- 
ing in His wings. We thank Thee that the 
offering was not our offering, but Thine. We 
thank Thee that the altar is not a place of Thy 
wrath, but the place of Thy love. We thank 
Thee that the intentions are all to '' usward " 
and all the same joy as the Christmas joy, in 
whose light we have been going toward the 
Easter Day. Father, grant that in each of our 
lives there may be a Palestine and a Galilee, 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 133 

and, above all, that in each life there may be 
so true a story of a real gospel that in all the 
convulsions of time and in all the transforma- 
tions of thought through darkness or through 
light and joy, our faith shall be stayed with the 
Inner Light. Amen. 

OTHOU God of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ, who is the Resurrection 
and the Life, we pray Thee at this moment and 
in this place consecrated in these hours to the 
most sacred of all the functions of our life, our 
worship, our rededication unto Thee, that we 
may have planted within us those powers of 
the resurrection which belong to Him, even to 
our Master and to our Lord, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OLORD who cometh down like rain and 
watereth the earth, nourishing the tender 
herb and giving the earth the inspiration that 
shall bring forth fruit and harvest, we pray 
Thee that at this moment, after the recollection 
of the springtime of the soul in the resurrec- 
tion of our Lord and Saviour, we may open 
the fields of our minds and all the woods and 
forest places, as well as the places of planting 
and even the hard and rocky places, so that the 
abundant and tender rain may come upon us. 
As Thou sayest, O God, that Thou Thyself 



134 PRAYERS OFFERED 

shall be our shield and our reward, so it has 
been said that Thou Thyself shall come down 
like rain, — nothing else but Thee, nothing 
short of Thee, nothing in Thy place. O, the 
abundant and mighty tenderness of springtime 
rain, breaking no heart, but healing the broken 
heart of winter and softening the spiritual all. 
Come, we pray Thee! Come, in the name of 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY Father, our God, our Friend, 
our great Companion, Thou dost not 
forsake us in the glory of Thine own revela- 
tion. Thou dost not create by the splendor of 
the shield of Thy Son, Captain of our salva- 
tion, a single great day at Easter time and 
leave us at the end of Easter with no Easter 
light or Easter comfort or Easter hope. We 
thank Thee, O God, that Christ is risen and 
that He is the risen Christ always, to be for- 
ever and ever the living Christ. So this morn- 
ing we continue our songs of adoration, our 
praises, our hallelujahs, in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU eternal Father who lookest down 
upon the earth and not only lookest 
down upon the earth, but who art with men 
and suffering with men, who dost come near 
humanity and who hast gone to the cross of 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 135 

Thine own gracious gift; Thou who dost offer 
the atonement, Thou who dost know the cost 
of the evil of the world, O survey this morning 
with piteous eye, we beseech Thee, the battle 
fields that give anguish to our hearts. We 
look to Thee, Father of all mercies, to be the 
Author of peace, in the Name of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OOUR Lord, our good and faithful 
Friend who lookest into us and touchest 
us with the hand of forgiveness whether we 
will or no. Thou who hast forgiven us before 
we have repented. Thou who didst give Cal- 
vary to us before we sinned. Thou who hast 
come so graciously, so before the time of our 
faith with an army to rescue, we pray Thee for 
the forgiveness of our sins. We pray Thee 
for the light of holiness upon our path, in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God, who art the Life and 
Light Eternal, who hast given us our 
Lord, Jesus Christ, to make Easter Day a per- 
petual prophecy that life shall outlast death, 
that the rewards of life are divinely given, we 
pray Thee, as we enter upon this service that 
the Easter light may shine in every heart, that 
always and everywhere we may look up to 



136 PRAYERS OFFERED 

Thee and especially at this moment may we see 
Thee the Author of light, Redeemer of life, the 
Sanctifier of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

OTHOU who art the first and the last, our 
God and our King, our never- failing 
Comfort and Companion, we adore Thee to- 
day for this Easter light and this Easter 
warmth and we thank Thee that these symbols 
of the springtime of the soul are come to us 
again for our blessing, for our inspiration, for 
our guidance, and above all, for the sanctifica- 
tion of our lives. O Lord, we approach Thee 
with great humility, remembering how vast is 
this theme and how we are permitted with our 
finite natures to come so close to an infinite 
reality. The whole universe to-day seems re- 
sounding with a vast Amen from heaven when 
all that our Saviour did and all that He spake 
is made eternally true by rising from the dead. 
Father, in heaven, we pray Thee as Thou 
gavest Thine only Son and as Thou gavest 
Him unto us — ^so not by our labors and our 
deserts, but by our gifts we are going home- 
ward. We pray to Thee that the resurrection 
warmth may come over all the coldness and 
iciness of our lives, melting it ; that the resur- 
rection light may come over all the darkness, 
driving gloom away. We pray in the Name 
of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 137 

O FATHER in heaven, we, Thy children, 
full of error, prone to falter, hardly 
knowing how soon we may fail, not know- 
ing that anything outside of us is break- 
ing the heart of the risen Redeemer on the 
cross of to-day that may not come from us, 
knowing how weak we are, still we pray — pray 
for our brothers in battle line, we pray, O 
God, for the wild and awful orgy to cease; 
we pray, Heavenly Father, we beg of Thee to- 
day to lift the hand of the scarred Redeemer, 
the wounded hand of Jesus, over the earth. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ Amen. 

OLORD, we pray Thee to-day that this 
may be a day of comfort and sweetness, 
especially to those who have drunken of the 
bitter cup, to those who know the sorrow and 
loss which comes by death. We would not 
make less, we would not make more painful the 
fact that we have known death. Thou hast 
spoken to this community. Thou hast taken 
one of the leaders in all of the best and richest 
and truest things in life from his place of 
power, and O Thou hast also spoken in the 
cottage and hamlet away out yonder on the 
plain, in the loneliness of the night. Thou hast 
spoken In palace hall. Thou hast sent Thine 
angel called death up and down the streets of 
our life^ and this angel has not made a differ- 



138 PRAYERS OFFERED 

ence with the rich and poor. Send Thou 
Thine angel of Life, and may every household 
and every lonely heart to-day feel and know 
the joy and persuasion of Easter. We ask in 
the Name of Him who was the Resurrection 
and is the Life. Amen. 

OTHOU who art the Resurrection and the 
Life, we give Thee the honor and joy, 
the loyalty and love of our hearts this morn- 
ing. We come to the end of the grave to-day, 
O Thou ascended Christ, and find the Gospel — 
good news of hope for those who are hopeless, 
the news of a life beyond for those whose lives 
here have failed, the news of the song round 
about the throne, sung by the redeemed for 
those who need redemption and have redemp- 
tion in our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 

O Thou Mighty Christ, Thou who didst 
burst asunder the bonds of death. Thou who 
hast the keys of hell and of death, accept our 
hearts for the conquest and in thankfulness for 
the victory we will give Thee praise and honor 
forever, through God and the Holy Spirit. 
Amen. 

WE confess the lordship of Jesus Christ, 
our Father in heaven. We have seen 
Him in these days when we have been follow- 
ing Him here. The Little Child of Bethlehem, 
the Brother at home and upon whom there 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 139 

have been visited the scorn of neighbors and 
the distrust of His own. We have watched 
Him in the vales of GaHlee, we have seen Him 
in Samaria upon His path of duty. We have 
gone all the way again through this glorious 
year to find the Gospel. We have not found it 
even at Calvary. We know that He said, 
"And I, if I be lifted up, shall draw all men 
unto me " — but we cannot give our Christ over 
to death. We cannot believe that it is all and 
in all for us to leave Him even at the tomb of 
Joseph of Arimathea, so this morning we come 
around that tomb with various experiences 
and with various influences, but with one 
heart — eager, wistful, trembling, wonder- 
ing if it may be so, sure that it must be so. 
Some of us are here for the first time 
with mother or father in yonder grave. Some 
of us are here for the first time with a dear 
companion of youth, a sister or brother, whose 
face we shall see no more; others of us are 
here with dear little children who have passed 
from our side just as we began to love them 
and care for them. Others of us are here with 
those whom a whole lifetime has endeared to 
us inexpressibly, and we sit no more by their 
side, and we are thinking of them as we crowd 
to the sepulchre of Jesus. With what thanks- 
giving do we come away! We have seen the 
face of an angel. We have heard a voice, 
" He is not here, but He is risen " as He said. 



140 PRAYERS OFFEREI) 

O Lord, we thank Thee for what our Sa- 
viour says, and we thank Thee for what He 
accompHshes, and whatever He says, He ac- 
complishes. Ours IS the Gospel of Resurrec- 
tion henceforward, the Gospel of things buried 
by the power of God, breaking through all the 
crust of circumstances and all the outworks of 
evil and the stone that has been rolled against 
the grave for safe keeping. Goodness is alive 
in the world! The wounds are still upon its 
hands, but goodness is no longer a remote and 
abstract thing. It is He ! — He who said unto 
us, " I am the Resurrection and the Life," and 
again we give our lives to Him, our Risen 
Christ. Amen. 



Mother's Day 

SPEAK to us, Thou Still Small Voice, as 
we would feel through the painter's art 
some tenderness that no violence of color or 
sharpness of line or vastness of canvas can 
give, come Thou in small, sweet experiences of 
each private soul. And as with all things of 
earth that make us hush, and as great sounds 
are profound, so may there be this morning in- 
timations to us from the land of memory, the 
land of experience, the land of hope, of all Thy 
message. 

Many of us are here on this day dedicated to 
the word Mother. We are here with mother. 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 141 

and we thank Thee and speak with the still, 
small voice, as a mother comforteth her chil- 
dren. Others of us are here with experiences 
of motherhood. They yet abide, these angels 
of our childhood, and bend over us. Speak to 
us as our mother spoke to us the dearest things 
— all great things — in a still, small voice. 

We are here, all of us, children of hope, and 
we desire to meet them by and by. Help us so 
to live as to be worthy, and, O Lord, help us, 
above all, to lift one humble prayer this morn- 
ing for the mothers of the land. Speak and 
teach them to speak to their children in a still, 
small voice — not the tempest, not the earth- 
quake, not the fire. And O may we rear an 
American conscience that shall be our still, 
small voice. So help these mothers of the 
land to bring out of all the tumult and discord, 
the noise of our time, the music of the inner 
life and the inner hope. 

We ask in the Name of Him who has spoken 
to us, even Jesus. Amen. 

OUR Father God, Thou art deeper than 
the sea ; Thou art stronger than the fool- 
ishness of man; Thou art mightier than all 
things else. So we draw our thoughts this 
morning away from lesser things, from all 
things, and we enter into Thy presence with 
awe and love, with open minds, trustful hearts, 
for Thou art our Father. As we think of our 



142 PRAYERS OFFERED 

world this morning we think of all the world 
and we think of Him who, greater than all the 
world, ruleth over all. Father, calm us. Teach 
us the sweetness and holiness of Thy love. 
Give us this morning to a theme that draws us 
from the circumstance and environment of 
time. O, Thou Mother-God; O, Thou who 
didst speak in Him as He said, ^'As a hen gath- 
ereth her chickens under her wings '' — teach 
us the motherhood in the universe to-day, in 
the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. Amen. 

Decoration Day ' 

WE ask Thy blessing this morning, O 
God, upon the nation that walks with 
stately and solemn step to bedew with tears 
again the flowers that grow out of the graves 
of our fallen warriors. We thank Thee, our 
Father, for a clean flag. We pray Thee that 
we may help to keep it clean by being right and 
just and heroic for truth. We beseech Thee, 
O Lord, to lead with Thine own tender hand 
these our old soldiers who remain to-day to re- 
flect glory upon our shield. Lead them with 
infinite tenderness down the slope, and we pray 
Thee that they may learn the beauti fulness of 
Thy calm that shall lead into the gates of sleep 
and we beseech Thee that their sleep may be 
postponed until our nation shall be wakened to 
the greatness of the truths for which they 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 143 

fought and in whose glory they shall stand. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

Prayers used at Baccalaureate Service of 
Armour Institute of Technology 

OTHOU God of all truth, Thou who art 
our Father and our everlasting Friend, 
we bring to Thee the precious treasures repre- 
sented here this morning in the lives and for- 
tunes of these young men, and thank Thee for 
all the beauty of this hour, with all its possi- 
bilities and comfort of strength and assurance 
to our common brotherhood. We bring to 
Thee thanks for the sacrifices of mothers and 
fathers and sisters and friends and of the old 
homes. We consecrate again unto Thee the 
efforts of those who have labored with these, 
our beloved ones, and we ask that their tears 
and prayers may be this morning tears of re- 
joicing and prayers that Thou alone shouldst 
guide these whom we would guide but whom 
we may not guide because they shall have the 
heavenly guidance. We pray that all of us 
here to-day may recognize the fact that we are 
at the beginnings, the commencement season 
and every day we graduate and every morning 
we begin anew. May we here to-day enter 
more deeply into that great school of Thine 
own, that Institute of Thy Love and Provi- 



144 PRAYERS OFFERED 

dence, and so at the end find rest, beginning 
again, graduated from life here into the life 
there that it may be indeed not the end but 
with these whom we love, the beginning, the 
commencement 

We ask in the Name of the Eternal God, 
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Am. .. 

ALMIGHTY Father, our God who art the 
secret of all gravitation, Love that 
unites. Love that holds together our universe. 
Love that is the law, we adore Thee. We 
have knelt to Thee in the laboratory, we have 
followed Thee through many days in the se- 
cret pathways of Thine own progress. We 
have hitched our burdens to Thee ; Thou hast 
pulled them along, and Thou art through slh 
the world to-day challenging man's obedience, 
man's power of discovery, for haply he may 
touch Thy garment in order that all human 
concerns may be pulled along by love, and 
pulled upward so that we shall be in the celes- 
tial world and all our terrestrial interests shall 
be made the interest that may endure. 

Happy and blessed are they who have en- 
dured. Happy are these men who have en- 
dured the discipline of their course. Shall the 
discipline of life be less important? Are there 
no graduation days ahead when the body dies ? 
O, Lord God, have we not seen enough of the 
destruction of bodies so that we no longer re- 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 145 

vere the body of anything as an ultimate form, 
so that we revere and honor alone the thing 
that makes these bodies what they are, — the 
organizing reality within and behind all matter 
speaking through all life. We have seen the 
body die in the test tube and in the retort. We 
behold * die in many of the processes of his- 
tory a' id if we believe to-day in the conserva- 
tion of force, we believe there is one force we 
bow before— our God. We may deny; we 
may insist that we do not believe one God, one 
law, one element, and one far-off divine event 
toward which the whole creation moves, but 
we see this event in the laboratory of life and 
especially do we see it when the Master comes 
into the laboratory. We have read the chap- 
ters of the dark time when men thought that 
the worths of life were cattle, long years and 
bowing relatives and supremacy by power or 
inheritance. We are living to-day in an atmos- 
phere when the worths of life are all of the 
mind. We are come to Mount Zion, the City 
of the Living God, the heavenly Jerusalem 
with an innumerable company, but the song of 
this company is a song of self-sacrifice and not 
selfishness; they sing to the Slain Lamb. In 
the name of the Father. Amen. 

ALMIGHTY God who givest us life and 
light, who art Thyself the Light of 
lights and the Life of all life, we bring to Thee 



146 PRAYERS OFFERED 

to-day reverently and lovingly our offering, the 
great future we dedicate this morning: youth, 
strength, hope, and achievement. We wait for 
Thy blessing. May this hour be an hour in- 
deed in which the mercies of heaven shall 
stream into all our hearts, waking us to the 
grandeur of life. May we learn this morning, 
if never before, that a golden milestone abides 
in the history of our existence on earth; that 
there are springs whose freshness and sweet- 
ness are never to be forgotten; that we have 
been drinking this morning from one of these 
springs. We ask in the Name of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

OUR Father God who dost give unto us 
the riches of this life and the Life Eter- 
nal, we bring to Thee our gratitude this morn- 
ing for the years which we passed in such holy 
and happy relationships as bring to this morn- 
ing also their perfume and make the rod and 
power which is held out by these our young 
and beloved friends a budding rod indeed. We 
thank Thee for all the fragrance that makes 
strength and for all the loveliness that makes 
power, and pray that these may grow into that 
larger, sweeter liberty which comes in the ma- 
turity of life. O Lord, while the world is 
shaken with disorder and under the tramp of 
armies, we give to Thee these sons to be sol- 
diers indeed ; to reckon upon the fact that they 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 14T 

must enter every true battle of principle as 
against an insane time. O Lord, may they 
know the opportunity which comes because of 
their privilege; may they feel this morning 
that it is theirs indeed to enter into that war 
for great ideas, for larger and sweeter under- 
standing one man of another, one nation of 
another, one class of society of another. May 
we have peace, but may we have only the peace 
of righteousness and justice and truth. Give 
to these. Thy young knights, a moment, we 
pray Thee, of consecration. Touch them, we 
beseech Thee, with Thy sword, that theirs may 
be the sword of the Lord God and of Gideon. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



Christmas 

OGOD, our Father and our King, what 
thanks are ours this morning that we 
bring to Thee but the thanks of hearts set to 
the music of this Christmas Day and these 
Christmas hours that stretch forward into the 
days that are to be. O, opened Heaven and 
happy earth; O music between earth and sky, 
music of man in his sorrow and his sin, the 
music of salvation and of comfort, music of 
angels from above, how happily, how divinely 
great and true. Father, hast Thou united earth 
and heaven. How true is this Christmas 



148 PRAYERS OFFERED 

thought, how sure is our phristmas Reward, 
whom we worship as Him from whom cometh 
every good and perfect gift, Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. Amen. 

WE thank Thee, our God, for the incense 
of praise which arises this morning 
from the altars of our hearts. How meet it is 
that we should render unto Thee, as we are 
approaching the Christmas light the dawn of 
that wonderful new day, our praise. We 
bring to Thee this morning our poor lives, our 
failures, our mistakes, our sins, but with them 
our hopes, our joys in the dawning light of the 
coming Christ. O Lord, be Thou with us this 
morning; lead this worship; may it be abso- 
lutely in the hands of the great good God of 
the Christmas-time. We pray in the Name of 
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE are grateful unto Thee, O God, and 
in the humbleness which comes of the 
consciousness of the great and mighty projects 
within us, we give Thee our thanks that we are 
so much to Thee. We thank Thee that Thou 
hast loved us from the foundation of the 
world. We thank Thee that Christ is within 
the human soul, the hope of glory, the original 
intention of the soul, the primitive and pri- 
mordial thing to which the soul yearns, that 
manhood of which we are made capable be- 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 149 

cause we are sons of God. Father, we would 
not boast of our inheritance. We would be 
humble in the presence of the discovery which 
Jesus makes of ourselves to ourselves. We 
walk in the presence of our other brothers of 
the human family and in so far as they are 
nobler than we, we make the discovery within 
ourselves of the possibility of being noble too. 
But with Him — Jestis only — we make the dis- 
covery of the infinite. We see no limits to the 
possibility of our poor lives. We know that 
we belong to Thee. It stirs up within us such 
pristine relationships to God that they vibrate 
with infinite music. So we bring to Thee our 
praise this morning, through Jesus Christ our 
Lord and Saviour. Amen. 

OUR prayer, O God, comes out of our 
praise. It is the blossom of all our 
gratitude. Because these things are so we 
pray Thee this morning that we may in all 
humility receive the lessons which are coming 
to us in the experience of life. Prepare each 
one of us for the genuine Christmas Event, in- 
terior, everlasting. May we have a manger 
cradle for the One for whom there is no room 
in the crowdedness of our life. May there be 
soft stars beaming from above; may there be 
an angel's song within us all day because of the 
coming of a sweeter and holier life, through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen. 



150 PRAYERS OFFERED 

HEAVENLY Father, wilt Thou forgive 
us, Thy children, that we have been so 
wise in earth's blundering and egotistic ways 
that we have been substituting formula and 
ritual for simple neighborliness, for kindness, 
generosity, and charity; that we have gone so 
far with our pride of mind that we have lost 
the heart. O, restore us, Lord! Bring us 
back by the way of the little Child this morn- 
ing; bring us by way of this mother's glorious 
career, as Thine own servant with the new hu- 
manity. Teach us the common duties here to- 
day and make sublime the simplicities of life. 
We ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 

AND may our lives be a great and continu- 
ous "Amen " with this thought and in- 
spiration and praise, O Thou Highest that is 
Loveliest, O Thou Loveliest that is Highest. 
'' Glory to God in the highest; peace on earth. 
Good Will to Men.'' We adore Thee this 
morning for the appeal of the highest outside 
of us to the highest within us. We pray Thee 
that the response of that divine religion which 
lies as history beneath all our faults and all our 
sins may be so great this morning to all the 
challenge to that which is high and noble and 
godlike, we may find the experience of godlike- 
ness in the communion which we have through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen. 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 151 

OLORD, we do praise Thee. In this 
Christmas Hght we give Thee the adora- 
tion of our hearts, and we pray Thee that we 
may give to Thee the loyalty of our lives. O 
Thou Gift of Gifts opening a new world, mak- 
ing the whole universe radiant with Thy pres- 
ence, be Thou with us this morning, Thou Lit- 
tle One of the manger; be Thou with us 
through all our life, with all the benefits of the 
gospel of Love and with all the benevolences of 
the Spirit of God, and especially be Thou with 
us, O Lord, throughout our life with Thy 
grace. May we not merely be glad; may we 
be obedient, obedient to all the light of Christ- 
mas, so that now we shall open our hearts and 
make our hearts a Christmas gift indeed, in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 

OLORD God Almrghty, we thank Thee 
for a choral religion. We thank Thee 
for that manifestation of Thyself that reor- 
ganizes a discordant universe and gives us the 
true chord of being. We are rejoicing to-day. 
Heavenly Father, that this religion which has 
come to be the life of man, the hope of the 
world, in spite of all the failures of human na- 
ture still sets its notes before us, still challenges 
the musical power in the human soul, still de- 
mands harmony of life with the infinite, and 
still waits, therefore, for its victory. We pray 



152 PRAYERS OFFERED 

Thee that at once, this morning, we may so 
chord our lives to this mighty theme that our 
lives may be a perpetual Christmas. We ask 
in the Name of the First Christmas Gift, our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD, as we come to this great festival 
of thought and hope and love and vision, 
we recount our sins and transgressions ; we re- 
member our iniquities. We have failed in the 
presence of such lofty ideals, we have gone 
astray in spite of the influence of such holy 
purposes. We need Thee, great, forgiving 
Love, and we pray for Thy forgiveness in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



ALMIGHTY God, who hast revealed Thy- 
self in the Christmastide, and who hast 
given to earth a song sweeter than the song 
which was sung by those when the morning 
stars were together and rejoicing, — hear our 
prayer, we beseech Thee, this morning as we 
add our petitions to the song, and grant us now 
and always the presence of the living Christ 
born in the manger of our life when the inn is 
too full and too occupied to admit even the 
Lord, and this we pray in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 153 

ALMIGHTY God and Giver of all Gifts, 
we thank Thee for the Gift which has 
been pronounced by Thine own saint and 
prophet, the Unspeakable Gift. We can talk 
to one another this morning of gifts of friend- 
ship and gifts of love; we shall find this a week 
in which all the sweet ministries of the heart 
shall come throbbingly along the common 
roadways of life with their gifts; — ^but what 
are gifts unless in the atmosphere of the Un- 
speakable Gift? What are the gifts of which 
we may speak — even fatherhood, even mother- 
hood, the tender associations of childhood, the 
mightier associations of love — what are they 
all, save in the love of God, in Christ Jesus, 
our Lord ? 

Accept our heartiest gratitude. Great Father 
of the Human Soul, for the Unspeakable Gift, 
as we name His Name, Jesus, bom in Bethle- 
hem, crucified on Calvary, risen at Olivet, and 
at home in the eternal Christmas of the Sky! 
Amen. 



Special Prayers 

LORD God Almighty, we simply continue 
this prayer to Thee to a bright and pure 
to-morrow. Guide me, be with me to-night. 
This is the cry of the city of Chicago, bedrag- 
gled, misunderstood by herself, faulty, but 
hopeful; staggering, but staggering toward the 



154 PRAYERS OFFERED 

light. Better to-day than she was yesterday, 
praying that to-morrow may be pure and 
bright for every one who walks her streets. 
She prays to-day, " Be with me to-night." O 
God, Thou who seest all things and knowest 
how night hides the foulest of the beasts and 
the most poisonous of the serpents, how the 
lion goeth forth in the night for his prey, be 
with me to-night. May this be the prayer of 
every man and woman inside the city gates. 
May, therefore, there begin in each heart such 
a residence of God, such a presence of the Al- 
mighty that the gates of the city shall be like 
battlements and her walls shall be called salva- 
tion and her gates praise, in the Name of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



WE come to Thee this morning, O Lord, 
with the recollection of dear ones who 
have passed from us in these recent hours, 
and of the recollection of those who still linger 
with us and are yet in sickness and in weakness 
and in need of Thy grace. We pray Thy 
blessing upon those who this morning come 
into our prayer as we think of them, as we 
have seen them and heard their voices praising 
the God before whom we bow in this place and 
asking for His help. O Lord, our Father, we 
beseech Thee that we may be thankful for a 
religion so luminous and illuminating to human 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 155 

life and through all the dark places that the 
lanes of light may be evident leading more and 
more into the perfect day. We ask in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



OLORD, we ask Thee, as we have been 
asked this morning to pray that Thou 
shouldst go to the houses of mourning, that 
Thou shouldst give Thy great blessing to the 
most mistaken, to the most misled, to the most 
wicked of all upon the earth. Lord, gather 
Thy raggedest, poorest, blindest, of Thy chil- 
dren in Thy arms of mercy. We ask this in 
the Name of Him who walked to the leper and 
cleansed him, gave eyes to the sight of the 
blind, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 

WE bring to Thee this morning, Heavenly 
Father, those who have asked that we 
should pray for them, that family so sorely 
stricken in the sorrow that may not be men- 
tioned, worse than death, and we beseech Thee 
that though we do not know their name and 
Thou dost know all names, that Thou shalt 
find them by the feet of love and bless them 
and restore them to honor and purity. We 
pray Thee also, Heavenly Father, for those 
who are looking into the faces of them that 
seem to be dead and departed. May we know 



156 PRAYERS OFFERED 

that death has no victory, may we understand 
that the grave has been despoiled of its tri- 
umph, and may they, above all, know that life 
has opened a new gateway and for him who 
so loved beauty may there be an abundant en- 
trance into the land of Beauty and Truth, 
through Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD, our God, in the name of those 
whom we love and who are suffering 
this morning, and especially in the name of 
him who stands upon the very verge of the 
awful future, we ask Thy blessing and guid- 
ance, and as friendship to-night shall take its 
way to yonder hospital may there be found new 
life and new strength. Guide Thou, we pray 
Thee this morning, those who are helping any- 
where and everywhere to enrich and prolong 
all the harvest to the value of human life. We 
ask in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. Amen, 



OTHOU God who hast given unto us One 
of jflesh and blood, who hast gone 
through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, 
we pray Thee this morning that Thine own 
great Servant, Thy Son, our Redeemer, shall 
go to bedsides of pain and sorrow and distress 
and lead our dear ones gently into the light of 



ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS 157 

the day. We ask in the Name of our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 



OLORD, we feel to-day that our hearts 
overflow with sympathy with those that 
are in trouble and we beseech Thee in Christ's 
Name to bless those who are in affliction. O 
Father, tenderly lead those whom we love who 
are walking to-day for the first time by the edge 
of a grave that shall contain that that is visibly 
nearest and dearest. O God, stand Thou in 
the presence of Jesus Christ, the Resurrection 
and the Life with them by the grave's side and 
may they look upward and know Thee as the 
Redeemer of their lives. We ask in the Name 
of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

OLORD, we bring to Thee this morning 
places of pain and of sorrow and of 
sickness, and we ask Thee, according to the 
request of Thy servant, that Thou mightest 
pour out of the wealth of Thine own great love 
so completely into the souls of those who are 
suffering that all suffering shall pass into the 
life of God. O, great Sea, Thou canst take 
all our streams that come through man's bring- 
ing down from afar many of the unpleasant 
things, many of the sorrowful things. God is, 
and God alone is, and in the circumference of 
God all other things are lost. We pray Thee 



158 PRAYERS OFFERED 

to receive our lives into Thine v^ith this com- 
pleteness, in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

WE come to Thee, our Father, v^ith the 
special prayers that are to be ofifered 
this morning for those who are in affliction and 
in distress. We pray Thee for the young 
hearts that are deeply troubled and are wearied 
before the days of maturity and strength. We 
beseech Thee, O Lord, for those who do not 
know how to turn and who shall not be able to 
turn alone to the right path. Wilt Thou give 
them the guidance of Thy Spirit, and wilt 
Thou help them in these times to help others ? 
Give us the habit, O Lord, of entertaining an- 
gels unaware. May we find Thee in the poor 
and the weak and the sorrowful and the dis- 
couraged. May we remember that Thou say- 
est unto us: He that doeth it unto the least of 
these doeth unto Me. We ask this in the 
Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
Amen. 



Musical Selections Referred to in Prayers 
on Following Pages: 

" Be my tent and in Thy covert, 
hide me from the tem- 
pest's war." 
Hymn : Hyfrydol Gunsaulus-Protheroe 49 

•* Let me never be confounded." 

E flat Festival Te Deum . . Dudley Buck 50 

•* And triumph over death and 
thee, O time." 
" Round about the Starry 
throne" (Samson) Handel 50 

"Mighty Ruler, Mighty Lover, 
Mighty Saviour." 
In that day there shall 
be a root of Jesse Gunsaulus-Protheroe 51 

** God so loved the world, that 
he gave his only begotten 
Son" Stainer 52 

" These are they that came out 

of great tribulation " Patty Stair 53 

"Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God 
Almighty, who wast, who 
art, and is to come " H.J. Stewart, .,..•. 55 

"In the shadow of the cloud 
so chill and dim, we are 
clinging, loving, trusting." 
Jesus Only Rotoli 56 

" And triumph over death and 
thee, O time." "Then 
round about the starry 
throne" (Samson) .. .Hani^/.. 58 

*' I shall tent on love's, high- 
way." Hymn: Hyhydol. Gunsaulus-Protheroe 59 

159 



160 MUSICAL SELECTIONS 

*' He sendeth the springs into 
the valleys, that run among 
the hills " Protheroe 60 

" I only know I cannot drift 
beyond His love and care." 

The Silent Sea Neidlinger 60 

I'm a pilgrim .Marston 61 

Fierce, was the wild billow. . Moble 62 

Hymn : " Blest be the tie that 

binds " 62 

"Judge of the Nations, be 
with us yet, lest we for- 
get, lest we forget." 
Recessional Kipling-Schnecher, . . S7 

" Surely, He has borne our 
griefs and carried our sor- 
rows." (Messiah.) Handel 129 

" Be with me to-night." 

Keep me, Lord, the 

shadows Falling Mathews 153 



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